Erik Kessels Failed It! in Arles
The photo curator has installed a wonderfully mistaken ridden exhibition at France's leading photo festival
Erik Kessels, the photo collector, curator and co-founder of the international communications agency KesselsKramer is also a proud failure.
“If I have ever tried I have screwed up,” he writes in his new book Failed It!, a visual meditation on the creative potential of making mistakes. “These minor catastrophes I'm referring to aren’t mere learning experiences – after which wrongs are righted, instruments are recalibrated, courses are reset – but they are themselves early brushes with success.”
To prove his point, Kessels has installed a wonderfully slipshod version of Failed It! at France’s finest art photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.
His exhibition Fabulous Failures is on display at Arles’ Musée du Palais de l'Archevêché until 25 September. It features a wealth of goofy visual screw-ups, from mixed-up jigsaws to glitch-ridden digital printouts. Kessels and co have complimented the error-ridden material with an equally misguided hanging, that sees pictures left askew against walls, piled on top of one another, and strewn around the building’s neoclassical interior.
Failure has rarely looked so compelling. To see more of Kessels’s favourite failures order a copy of Failed It! here.