Mike Kelley – Educational Complex Onwards (1995-2008)

In 1995, Mike Kelley devised the Educational Complex, an amalgam of every school he attended and of the house he grew up in, «with all the parts I couldn’t remember left out»–a total environment, «sort of like the model of a Modernist community college.» The blind spots in this model represent forgotten («repressed») zones, and so are reconceived by Kelley as sites of institutional abuse, for which specific traumas were devised (each having their own video and sculptural component). For Kelley, this work marks the beginning of a series of projects in which pseudo-autobiography, repressed-memory syndrome and the reinterpretation of previous pieces become the tools for a poetic deconstruction of such complexes and the way we interact with and narrate them. Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008 is the first book to collect these works. Each project within the series is extensively documented by artist’s texts and reference material, while essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Howard Singerman and Anne Pontégnie examine the place of this body of work within Kelley’s oeuvre.