Jon Kessler’s works are like the large digestive system of a crazy and tragic world. Wars, presidents, surveillance, mass-media floods, ideals of beauty, and death—these elements play into Kessler’s cosmos of kinetic installations, where everything is turned around, flipped upside down, torn apart, and rebuilt. In the history of media art, too, there is no denying the influence of his works: screens, videos, photo collages, sculptures rattling with noise, devices that survive human error. And then there are the spatial installations that lie somewhere between truth and media output, whose sensory overload can make you dizzy.

Kessler became well-known for his diverse visual language. Today, he works on smaller sculptures in which animals live (even deer “sleep” in his works). Many of his sculptures are made of porcelain, partially glazed, a kind of biotope of abstract, inorganic plants. But these are far from idyllic (it simply wouldn’t be Kessler if they were). Surrealism runs through his entire body of work, not necessarily as a common thread or stylistic device, but rather as the digestive juice that keeps everything moving. Whether it is in his large-scale political machines from the early 2000s or his current natural objects, they all write stories of our time and show the world as we process it in our dreams, or in our nightmares.