Erik van Lieshout

Die Insel works on paper (2015-2016) Invited to create a work for Emscherkunst2016 - an art project that attempts to rebrand the former indrustrial heartland of the Ruhr-Rhineland - Van Lieshout proposed to carry out a four-month residency on an island in the middle of a lake. This lake is itself an artwork, of sort. Gentrification on a grand scale, it transformed a post-indrustial wasteland and its surrounding working class neighbourhood (now without work) into a natural wilderness and recreation facility, encircled by neo-modernist villas for the nouveau riche. As his preparatory drawings and collages reveal - shown behind the projections - Van Lieshout began musing about islands in general (as tax havens or places for refuge). Intrigued by the possibilities of this particular island - metaphorical and physical - his plan was to live there and use it as an outdoor studio. Obliged instead to live on-shore, he was permitted to row each day to the island, but porhibited from taking anything with him. His inclusion in the film of his discussion with finger-wagging civil servants ( who become increasingly unnerved at the thought to letting him loose upon their newly constructed paradise) makes a point about the type of art often desired by politicians, property developers and tourist boards: socially useful, entertaining, but not too troublesome.