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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.”
![Fabulous Failures by Erik Kessels art Les Rencontres d'Arles](/resource/fabulous-failures-erik-kessels-8.jpg)
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.
![Fabulous Failures by Erik Kessels art Les Rencontres d'Arles](/resource/fabulous-failures-erik-kessels-6.jpg)
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.
![Fabulous Failures by Erik Kessels art Les Rencontres d'Arles](/resource/fabulous-failures-erik-kessels-5.jpg)
Failure has rarely looked so compelling. To see more of Kessels’s favourite failures order a copy of Failed It! here.