"Invited to create a work for "Emscherkunst 2016"- an art project that attempts to rebrand the former industrial heartland of the Ruhr-Rhineland - Van Lieshout proposed to carry out a four month residency on an island in the middel of a lake. This lake is itself an artwork, of sorts. Gentrification on a grand scale, it transformed a post-industrial 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 of 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 prohibited 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 of 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.
Van Lieshout's initial idea was to work alone on the island, to improvise daily on this open air stage, filming a continuous performance. However, he soon realised that he needed a side-kick, a Man Friday o his Robinson Crusoe. He employed a Syrian refugee called Ahmad who becomes the 'straight man' for Van Lieshout's slapstick sequences and the source of strories that the artist retells, acting them out with found materials. Van Lieshout's decision to work with an asylum seeker was influenced by the context of his project: the on going refugee crisis provoked by the intensification of the Syrian war, and Angela Merkel's decision to welcome refugees to Germany. Migration, asylum and hospitality are recurring themes of "Die Insel". The island is by turns an asylumfor the artist and a hostile place, or blithely indifferent to his presence.
'Die Insel' premiered in June 2016. The same month, Great Britain voted to leave the European Union, and the press became full of images of islands. These fed into Van Lieshout's work, as he continued making collages and drawings about his island. The political fallout and potential implications of the Brexit decision have brought into sharper relief the themes that Van Lieshout suggests in his film, raising the question: can withdrawal ever be an act of engagement?"
(This text is an extract from the exhibition brochure of Erik van Liesthout : The Show Must Ego On, Wiels-Centrum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Brussel, 30.09.2016 - 08.01.2017)