Ryan Gander: “We all need to slow the fuck down”

Ryan Gander is a shapeshifter. His works rarely take on the same form, morphing across sculpture, film, performance and more. Previous pieces have included a disarming life-sized animatronic gorilla crouched under a desk (School of Languages, 2023); a reedited BBC documentary in which the artist becomes gradually more soiled and dust-covered (Dancing with My Own Agencies, 2018); and a vending machine full of natural stones instead of snacks and soft drinks (These Memories Are Not My Own, 2019-20). ‘This Is Feeling All of It’, the British artist’s new solo exhibition at Esther Schipper in Berlin, questions the limits of human cognition.

Making work for the show collaboratively with his six-year-old son, Gander took his cue from the “beautiful serendipity” of their pairing. They both see and traverse the world in significantly contrasting ways. “I’ve always been interested in semiotics and language, but am not very physical, as I happen to use a wheelchair to get around,” he tells me, when we speak over Zoom. Gander is in his Suffolk studio, surrounded by boards covered with notes, images and future ideas. “My youngest kid was diagnosed with autism a few years ago. He is nonverbal and not that interested in the traditional sense of language, which makes him really interested in physicality. It’s almost like we’ve been paired by happenstance to compliment and challenge each other.”

Gander did not want to present a sentimental father and son narrative, but instead focus on the surprising gaps and meeting points between them. “There is a lot of uncertainty, chance and magic in the works,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot from Baxter about the way you can communicate through sensitivity, or senses we don’t usually identify as good communication devices.” Through working with his son, Gander has gained a new perspective on how many people see the world.

He gives an example of visiting the forest near their house: while his son might become fixated on the leaves and individual branches, Gander will see the woods as a whole and then tune out from it. “The problem isn’t neurodiversity,” he says. “It’s the neuro-standardised world that neurodiverse people live in… But we are constantly blocking out information from our senses to deal with the things we need to do. There are things we won’t ever know because we are so conformist.”

He often aims to “sculpt and compose” the finished product when collaborating on artworks, but with Baxter, his usual process went out the window. While he says this was unnerving at first, he eventually opened himself up to his son’s approach to the material. “When we started working together, it was like me being some tyrant or art dictator!” he says. “It was really exciting those last few months making work because I literally didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like I was an art student again.”

The final show includes an overwhelming number of plastic children’s toys, regimentally organised with clear paths through them. It reflects on how difficult it can be to individualise and focus when faced with a barrage of information; a giant upside down balloon bearing the phrase “Do ghosts have teeth?”, which channels the limitless possibility of young minds; and a machine that fires out cards with Gander’s unrealised ideas for works of art. All together, the works explore the potent impact of contemporary communication and social media on the human mind. “It’s a fun show,” says Gander. “It would be good if people picked up on the vibe that we all need to slow the fuck down. We are so obviously overstimulated by this insane, sensational world that we never turn off. We have desensitised ourselves and we no longer have the ability to wait, or be bored, or do nothing. And we don’t even have the patience to contemplate that.”

While the show considers the information coming at us from the outside world, there is also a sense of looking inward, exploring the mass of information that we each transmit. The vending machine was a form of unburdening or “exorcising”. There are 2000 ideas for artworks loaded onto cards inside it, but Gander tells me there are thousands more in his studio that will never materialise. This uncomfortable proliferation of ideas is connected with mortality, a fight against time to realise as much as possible before we die. Many of his works have an interactive or durational aspect, slowing down time for the viewer and cutting through the urgent dash of exhibition viewing. A VR piece, Ryan Waiting, presents the artist in a futile in-between world, as his avatar has been set up to exist in blank space for 100 years. He describes this as a sense of purgatory, with no other people and no landscape. But it could also be seen as an escape from the never ending flood of images, facts and opinions.

Gander has reached a point in his career where his legacy is already being shaped. Next month, his first major European survey opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear in Cáceres, Spain. I wonder if the works start to make sense when he looks back on them all together. “You’d think they would, but they don’t,” he laughs. “Some of them I don’t even recognise or remember making. It’s like the rich fabric of life. That’s the point of living, to do things and try things and change.”

Many artists of Gander’s level create a uniform output, sometimes with factory-like precision, but he wants to keep his practice agile and diverse. He sees clear parallels between the limited nature of human cognition and the art world’s craving for predictable visual stimuli. “It feels like there are two art audiences; people who want to be challenged, and people who want to be pleased,” he says. “It’s a safety thing. Ten years ago, the world wasn’t as challenging as it is now. It was nice to be put out of our comfort zone and asked questions about mortality and the human condition. The world is so fraught now that people just want comfort. I don’t know whether they will realise they are doing themselves an injustice by eating visual junk food.”