Over the course of his four decade career, Mike Kelley (1954 – 2012) addressed the relation of establishment culture to counterculture. He shed light on social rituals and subcultures, whilst simultaneously parodying the imposition of institutionalized power and instruction.
With his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR) series (2000 – 2011), Mike Kelley set out to make 365 videos and video installations, one for each day of the year. Often accompanied by partial or full stage sets and sculptural components, these ‘video narratives’ restaged found photographs of extracurricular activities culled from Kelley’s collection of high school yearbooks. The EAPR series is closely related to Kelley’s seminal project ‘Educational Complex’ (1995), an architectural model of all the educational institutions he attended in which he left out the parts he could not remember, exploring the pervasiveness of repressed memory syndrome. The EAPR series came to an early end with ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais)’ (2011), one of the last videos Kelley ever made.
The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London will focus on this final EAPR which will be shown alongside related works. These include a series of never-before exhibited paintings of the cast of transgressive characters, a lightbox still from this EAPR and sculptures made using props from the video. The show will also present ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36B (Made in England)’ (2011), a companion video to ‘Vice Anglais.’
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