Erik Kessels

Four years after his project in a Vevey church, Erik Kessels returned to the venue with a surprising audio and visual structure made with thousands of LP covers from brass bands and folk music groups, thus reactivating the vernacular imagery typical of this secular style of music. The unique Dutch artist complemented his installation with a musical mix of some of the exhibited albums, shifting unexpectedly from a pleasant melody to cacophony. In this place of worship, also a meeting point for local chorales, the covers were presented on imposing wall structures pointing to the altar positioned in such a way as to form a huge Group Show in communion with viewers.

Erik Kessels discovered a series of amateur images on Internet, taken by Fred and Valerie, a Florida couple who share a passion for “funny wet adventures”: Fred photographs his partner spontaneously posing in all kinds of water settings. For the Festival, each photograph from the Valerie, in almost every picture #11 series was replaced in context, thus taking the image beyond the frame with Valerie always in the water, either springing from a municipal fountain like in a Fellini film, or as an Ophelia peacefully floating on Lake Geneva.

Erik Kessels’ installation materialized 24 hours of uploads on Flickr into a gigantic mountain of some 350,000 photographs piled up in the choir of a church in Vevey. The 24hrs in Photos project physically confronted visitors with the abundance and banality of snapshots posted daily on the Internet. The context of this display also hinted at the historically thorny relationships between various religions and images. Every Sunday during the Festival, a collective of writers gathered in the church to share their thoughts about the narrative potential of pictures by transforming these photos into short texts written on the spot.

The atypical Dutch artist Erik Kessels is known for his passion for anonymous images, found at flea markets or on the internet, which he then assembles in often absurd publications or thematic exhibitions. After notable projects at Festival Images Vevey in 2014 and 2018, this year Erik Kessels has created an unconventional life-size football match on the former orchard in La Tour-de-Peilz. He selected 22 black-and-white images from British sports archives to represent two teams of players and arranged them on this slightly sloping piece of land. He erased the ball in each shot, thus transforming them into casual choreographies.

Kessels’ Muddy Dance brings the beauty of footballers’ movements to the fore and turns this popular sport into a veritable art form.