workshop with erik kessels
Every year, the Institute of Design organises an interdisciplinary workshop for a total of 18 participating students. This year´s three-day workshop »Fabulous Failures« will be held by Amsterdam-based artist, designer and curator Erik Kessels.
About the workshop
Nowadays most art, design and photography are portraying perfection. Contemporary popular culture is drowning under a tidal wave of superficiality and over-perfection. Posed, polished and controlled. As if it were a reflection of our endless search for clarity and calmness and an antidote for the chaos in our lives. Technology allows us to refine the desired illusion of perfection even more. Digital techniques have created an abundance of images. We shoot and shoot until we get it right. The imperfect pictures get deleted and the good ones get a filter or a touchup.
In our perfection-obsessed culture we shy away from errors and that is, in Erik Kessels opinion, a disaster. An overabundance of skills and technological crutches eliminate the possibility of beautiful mistakes, of stunning failures and any result other than exactly what the maker set out to achieve.
Failing is something artists and creatives should more and more take as a subject for their work.
This workshop stimulates students from different disciplines to fight perfection, embrace serendipity and search for fabulous failures. In a three-day workshop Kessels will search together with the students what to find in their own ‘back garden’ and how to use this in their own work. Subjects like questioning your own confidence and creating from a ‘wrong’ direction will pass in these days. Finally every student will create a work in these days starting from a failure. All these Fabulous Failures will be shared at the end of the workshop.
About Erik Kessels
Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, designer and curator with great interest in photography. Erik Kessels is since 1996 Creative Director of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and works for national and international clients such as Nike, Diesel, J&B Whisky, Oxfam, Ben, Vitra, Citizen M and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel.
As an artist and photography curator Kessels has published over 50 books of his ‘re-appropriated’ images: Missing Links (1999), The Instant Men (2000), in almost every picture (2001-2015) and Wonder (2006). Since 2000, he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography.
For the DVD art project Loud & Clear he worked together with artists such as Marlene Dumas and Candice Breitz. Kessels writes regular editorials for numerous international magazines. He lectured at the D&AD Presidents Lecture and at several international design conferences such as in Singapore, Goa, NY, Toronto and Bangkok. He has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), Écal (Lausanne) and at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture where he curated a celebration of amateurism.
Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Use me Abuse me, 24HRS of Photos, Album Beauty and Unfinished Father . He als co-curated an exhibition called From Here on together with Martin Parr, Joachim Schmid, Clement Cheroux and Joan Fontuberta.
In 2010 Kessels was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and is often seen as the most influential creative of The Netherlands.
http://www.kesselskramer.com/
http://www.kesselskramerpublishing.com/