Kester Ellul

Kester Ellul works with found industrial footage, mostly from the maritime insurance sector: hull surveys, cargo damage assessments, the video record that gets filed when a container ship touches a quay too hard. This material is made to be evidence and is never made to be looked at. It has no framing, no cutting, no sense of an audience. Ellul acquires it through a broker in Piraeus and through freedom of information requests to port authorities.

His edits keep the original audio, which is almost always a surveyor talking to themselves, and cut the image to the rhythm of that voice. The effect is closer to a radio play than to documentary. You hear a person describing rust in a level, procedural tone while the picture moves through spaces that were photographed only to establish liability.

Ellul builds the installations physically as well. Load-Bearing at Borry Noord ran across nine monitors mounted on shipping brackets at the heights they would occupy in a hold. He is resistant to the projected image and to the darkened room, both of which he regards as attempts to make video behave like cinema when its actual native condition is the CCTV feed nobody is watching.

Ellul studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin. His work has been shown at the Malta Pavilion in Venice, at Kunsthalle Wien and at the Rotterdam Film Festival. He joined the gallery in 2021.