Mike Kelley, Ahh...Youth!, 1991 Photo: Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts
Bildupphovsrätt 2025
Mike Kelley
Ghost and Spirit
10.5 – 12.10 2025
Stockholm
Opens in 10 days
The works of Mike Kelley (1954–2012) probes the core of the human experience. As a late 20th-century heir to Pop Art, he examined the structures and contradictions of 1980s and 1990s American culture in groundbreaking works that expose, interrogate and provoke. He came to art through his involvement in anarchist political movements and experimental music scenes – he was a founding member of the proto-punk Detroit band Destroy All Monsters and a collaborator of the noise rock band Sonic Youth.
Mike Kelley did not shy away from social taboos and stereotypes. Rather, he embraced them to interrogate what he considered the mythologies of his time. – Hendrik Folkerts, curator of the exhibition
Bildupphovsrätt 2025
Memory, melancholy and the making of the self
With surgical precision and a dark sense of humour Mike Kelley laid bare the structures that create our sense of self. He wanted to understand how memory builds subjectivity; how childhood and adolescence permits the impermissible; how our societies are built up from belief systems and institutional structures; and how rituals keep those systems and structures alive.
Next to play and humour, there is a melancholy in Kelley’s work. Growing up in a working-class suburb of Detroit and later situating himself in Los Angeles – close to Hollywood, the throbbing heart of the American image-making machine – he felt a persistent sense of dislocation.
I was part of the TV generation. I was mediated … I was 'pop'. I didn’t feel connected in any way to my family, to my country, or to reality for that matter: the world seemed to me a media façade, and all history a fiction – a pack of lies.
This perspective, that “all history is a fiction,” allowed Mike Kelley to look in earnest at what constituted culture in his time, from its contradictions to its conspiracy theories.
Biography
Mike Kelley was born in 1954. After studying abstract painting at the University of Michigan, Kelley enrolled in the interdisciplinary school CalArts in California in 1976. While a student at CalArts, he started to work in performance, yet already including sculpture as a main feature. Language was a key aspect of his artistry as well, most notably by writing extensive scripts for his performances.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Kelley carefully shifted his practice to installation, as seen in “Monkey Island” (1982–83) and “Sublevel” (1998). Yet, performance remained central in his work, emphasising theatricality and relationality, always engaging viewers in visceral experiences. This culminated in “Day is Done / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions” (2005), a spectacular multimedia project reenacting high school yearbook photos of “extracurricular activities” found in a high school yearbook.
Mike Kelley remained in California for the rest of his life and, through his profound understanding of the perversities in contemporary culture, became one of the most influential artists of the past decades.
Bildupphovsrätt 2025
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit
“Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit” is organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Bourse de Commerce, Paris; and K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. The exhibition is curated by Catherine Wood, Director of Program, Tate Modern, and Fiontán Moran, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern.
The presentation at Moderna Museet is curated by Hendrik Folkerts, curator, Moderna Museet.
The architecture for Moderna Museet’s iteration of the exhibition is designed by the studio Formafantasma.
Supported by Mike Kelley Foundation For The Arts.
