KASSEL.- With the project Pre-, Pre-, Pre-, Pre-, Preview, San Keller (born in Berne in 1971) is making even the planning phase of his exhibition public. In doing so, he is undermining the boundaries of conventional formats and rendering institutional processes transparent. Visitors are directly incorporated in the process of development of his exhibition. He not only makes preparatory conversations between artist and curator Rein Wolfs in the conference room accessible to the public. Additionally, after they leave the Fridericianum San Keller invites visitors to take a stroll, which he calls Digestiv (Walk), with him around the forecourt of the Fridericianum to discuss the exhibitions by Carlos Amorales and Navid Nuur.

San Keller has garnered international attention with his participatory performances and provocative interventions. For Keller, art is not only challenging in terms of its content: “... Keller is at his most convincing when he uses his deceptive aura of sincerity, and his knack for audience interaction, to survey the rituals and pecking orders of the artworld itself, perusing the unsavory pleasures of social hierarchy and other intellectual routines that are so distinctive of the field. Such as the
fantasies of permanence and posterity, the wishful notions of trust and communication between artist and audience, and the patchy historical sensibilities that make things even more arbitrary than they need to be.” (Tirdad Zolghadr, Frieze 106, April 2007)