The following conversation between Angélique Heidler and Kerri Cole took place via Zoom in December 2024.

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I was thinking of a way to kick this off, and I was just in the supermarket next to my apartment, and they were playing Christmas music. I didn’t think much of it until whoever was singing belted out “it’s going to be a long and lonely Christmas.” It gave me such an odd feeling, and I became really aware of this tangled web of emotions and tradition and consumer culture, but in a really guttural way. Are they playing Christmas music in stores in France yet?

Not yet, actually I don’t recall supermarkets playing music at all here. A little while ago I used to work in this jewellery store and the manager had a Christmas playlist, it would be the same every damn year and it would drive me mad, there are just so many of these songs out there you know…

The one I heard today, the long and lonely Christmas one, this was new to me but I googled it and it was from 1975.

When I’d have to put that playlist on, I would always wonder why people love Christmas so much. I mean, when you’re a kid it makes sense, it’s kind of made for you, but when you get older (and don’t have children), you’d think people would see the late-stage capitalism we are stuck in and question this tradition. Is it because people are just happy to be taken care of by consumerism? Because during this time it feels ok? Maybe we need to boycott Christmas, like, fuck off, we aren’t spending any money, it’s not gonna happen. I also always feel uncomfortable when I think of all the people who don’t celebrate xmas and have to undertake the burden of the lousy decorations and, as you mentioned, the un-renewed xmas playlists everywhere they go. It needs to be deconstructed, rebranded, xmas needs some introspection, man.

I think it won’t get off the ground, people love this shit, you think they’d make a chocolate Santa that comes up to your knees if people weren’t buying it? There’s an audience for this. I mean, I just never grew up in a household of tradition, my Mum loathed Christmas.

My Italian grandma and Czech Grandpa were really into it, he made it mandatory to eat Carp Soup. This man (rest his soul) never taught us any Czech or never wished to share anything from Czecho culture, for valid enough reasons it seems, don’t get me wrong, but somehow he would insist that we ALL had to eat that damn Carp Soup. And you know it’s not like Italian and French food have nothing to offer food wise. Anyway… I think I was the only one who actually enjoyed the soup.

Carp soup?

Yeah! You buy the carp alive, it lives in your bathtub for a few days, then you slaughter it and make a soup. We never did it, but my Gran had to cook the soup for hours even though she didn’t like it. Now you understand why I take the men/women injustices so personally. I have some internal family conflict to untie. {laughs}

There is something about eating fresh water fish that, I don’t know…

I think that ecologically it’s less worse than salmon but don’t ask me why because I couldn’t explain properly, I say a lot of unverified, unchecked facts. Don’t trust nobody.

I naively envisage the salmon we eat still to be swimming upstream, leaping through the paws of awaiting grizzly bears, anyways, let’s get into the work. I wanted to talk about this work from your show at Weiss Falk earlier this year, with this huge anarchy symbol painted on the floor. I find this kind of iconography super interesting, as much as it’s constantly emptied of meaning, so detached from its origins and what it stood for. But let’s imagine it still represents true anarchy, order in disorder, for those that subscribe to it, utopia. What role does anarchy play in your work?

So breaking news, anarchy is not mayhem/chaos. I grew up thinking it was the most rebellious system scheme but recently, when I knew I was going to paint that sign on a carpet, I did a bit of research, read Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman and Une petite histoire de l’anarchisme by Marianne Enckell, about the movement’s origins and history, and it’s actually pretty chill, rather utopian and peaceful. Basically, the US government at the time made it look satanic in order to maintain their power. Sounds quite relevant today, too. {laughs}

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Yeah, for the most part you just got some small society type communes, right?

Right, there was a famous French anarchist Louise Michel and she says “power is cursed, this is the reason why I’m an anarchist.” She fought until she died. Black flag and all, you know. She was also a big time animal rights defender. In the 1850-80s. Visionary queen. Weirdly or not, anarchy feels to me like the purest form of society. Anyway, about the work you’re referring to, A, it was an aesthetic thing. I remember writing it everywhere in my teenage years, walls, agenda, print-outs at school, tables, etc., and my name being Angélique, it was like a tag.

I remember my Mum having a copy of the anarchist cookbook, which was published during the height of the counterculture era in the very early ’70s in opposition to United States involvement in Vietnam and contained instructions on how to make explosives or manufacture illicit drugs.

I remember it was also trendy to read the Little Red Book.

I’ve never deep dived into these things, just kind of let them permeate through me by, I don’t know, reading the Wikipedia entry. Like reading the plot of a movie in leu of watching it.

I watch the trailer, I’m more about the aesthetics.

As with your use of the anarchy symbol. But harnessing this hackneyed iconography spans a lot of your work.

There are Che Guevara prints in one of the works of this show, Most Wanted, and it sits next to pictures I took of the inside of a guy’s closet in London which was a combo of expensive perfume bottles, cigars, sneakers, watch cases, and a safe.

Che Guevara is H&M.

They have Slipknot sweaters now.

Makes sense, I remember being in there as a kid with my Mum and they had racks of Ramones T-shirts and she couldn’t believe it, it kind of went against everything she thought she represented. But now it’s like of course there are Ramones t-shirts in H&M. I see this kind of flippancy with handling different codes and networks of meaning and representation in your work, but is there a level of research into the things that end up in the paintings?

Only as far as a level of responsibility towards myself.

Whilst on the topic of H&M, could you speak to these paintings containing these almost cursed-image-esq pictures of malls?

The shopping centre you’re referring to is in Romainville just outside of Paris. It’s called the Paddock, and for some reason even in the outskirts, this industrial part of the city, they went with this castle theme. You have a KFC, an Adidas store, a real estate agents with a budget hotel on top. I mean, who was it built for? For this one I really struggle to put myself in the position of the marketing executive and define the target customer. I’m a bit obsessed with malls because they represent everything that makes me angry. You can see the zombies, sellers and buyers, the liars, the hierarchies, the stars, and once you’re out of that subhuman bubble, it smells like piss. They are like mini dystopias. Imagine the whole planet becoming a proper movie-like dystopia, part of the galaxy, becoming itself a dystopia. How many dystopian planets like us in the galaxy and then how many dystopian galaxies and so on. Everything started in shopping centres on planet Earth. {laughs}

But in the other paintings, the images depict the interiors.

They depict children’s playgrounds inside these malls. I found the website of a designer who builds these play areas not only for malls, but also banks, insurance agencies, etc. The pictures were all clearly taken at night when these malls were closed or in the super early morning, which gives an even more gloomy ambiance. Counter balanced by coloured pop tangy stars, hearts, question marks, etc. These works are pretty cynical. I’m always preoccupied by the fate of the world yet I am an optimist by nature so my artworks are where these two sides of my personality collide I guess.

I’m always finding myself in these malls here in Berlin, in the former GDR in the East of the city, and they are great time capsules. You have all these contemporary stores slotted into the infrastructure and architecture of a mall built in the very early ’90s that has more or less been left to, well, not rot exactly, they are always impeccably clean…

Today I was in the mall next to my studio with my Grandma having lunch in one of the restaurants, it’s actually a famous piece of architecture. It was built by a couple of architects, Gailhoustet and Renaudie, in the ’70s, and has offices, flats, and shops. Renée Gailhoustet also built the building where I have my studio and Jean Renaudie built a lot of social housing in the centre of Ivry, I grew up in one of them and so did a large part of my family.

All of the flats have gardens or terraces. They’re on top of the mall and basically you can walk around the whole thing. Now half of the stores are closed. Anyway, I’ve kind of always been inside this place since childhood, hanging around in inline roller skates, to now, using it to get from point A to B of the city if it’s raining or something.

What kind of restaurant?

French Brasserie. I’d never stepped foot in there, but then my Gran enters and the owner is all “Oh, hello Elizabeth! How are you? Do you want your usual table?” People were passing, saying hi. She knows everyone there.

But no Christmas music?

Oh, here in the restaurant the music was very loud. But not xmas music.

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We can’t seem to get off the topic of malls and these infrastructures put in place for shopping.

Well, I’m drawn to these places, as are the majority. It’s no surprise Topshop had this strategy where you had to circulate the whole store, every rail and shelf, to get from one side of the store to another, or to leave, or to reach the escalator, they played the music so loud that if you were in there not buying, you would find the volume so irritating that you’d leave and make space for the ones who were the right customer.

As to not take up valuable space.

Going back to the show at Weiss Falk, marketing was something raised in that show, the titles were pulled from marketing vocabulary.

Did you employ a Topshop style install too, or…

If you compare it to a journey through a shop I can relate, but it’s far from a Topshop-esq marketing ploy, it’s all intuition, they are installed in the same way that I make the works themselves, composition, colours, and so on… But it’s funny we’ve gotten stuck on this shopping theme, because I’m aware of the hypercriticality that on one hand I point a finger at late-stage capitalism, but I also have to participate within it, buying cheap plastic items from dollar stores, it’s all very paradoxical.

But is it seduction? Like, because I’m seduced I can harness and pass that on…

I’m not into that game.

I find myself at this idea of anarchy again, or at least order in disorder, and I’m thinking about hierarchies between the elements in the work, because scale and composition suggest such things, yet nothing seems elevated.

I tend not to think about hierarchy, I really consider all the elements on a formal scale, as brush strokes, to me they have the same role.

I want to talk about production versus consumption, because during our conversation so far, it’s felt consumption-heavy simply because we’ve unfairly narrowed in on consumer goods and their drivers. But do you consider production and the supply chains that bridge that gap? Right now we are talking on Zoom and you’re wearing a track jacket that says Atlanta on the left breast and USA repeatedly embroidered down each arm, and you know, you can walk into again say H&M and be confronted with a t-shirt in that has MIAMI emblazoned across the front for what seems to be absolutely no reason at all, you end up with a Swedish designed garment, bearing the name of a city in the United States, made in Bangladesh, shipped by a Chinese shipping company, being sold in I don’t know, Turin. The codes of meaning are so muddied at this point.

I like the Miami example, in France I often see shops selling hoodies or what not with Harvard or Yale or some American university printed across the front. Do the people wearing this know what it represents and willingly want to tell the world they’re a fan? But say if I use something in my work purchased for one euro in a store in Ivry, I can’t get overly worried about its place in the supply chain or whatever.

Because it’s more about what this cheap plastic object means now, in this store in Ivry?

I think what you’re alluding to is more relevant to my use of images, that’s where I am interested in origins and context, but I tell myself a little story and that’s it, it doesn’t change the finished work and by the time it ends up in say, a painting, it’s part of something else.

Sorry to drag you back to plastic objects again, but tell me about the dolls.

It’s a motif that started with a random interest in Poulbots imagery, invented by Francisque Poulbot in the 19th or 20th century. You have these typical Montmartre painters in Paris painting en plein air and feature this character sometimes. It’s a little boy, the “typical Parisian.” He shows his ass, he pees in the Seine, he kisses a girl. He doesn’t always respect the girl’s consent, according to the drawings. I have one right here where the girl is sat and tied to the chair and he’s holding pliers, about to rip her lashes off it seems. They are satirical illustrations but in a very stereotyped way and in a 19th century context, which is I guess what I was drawn too: the very strong markers, tags that build a stereotype. In a way, it’s a representation of the public opinion of a given timeframe. Also, these Poulbots that end up on a lot of postcards, retain a cute aesthetics despite the violence they can sometimes depict. I reproduced one in a painting way back in 2018, but through working with this imagery it became a motif which led me onto dolls, who most of the time have the same features. They represent humans, child humans, and some of them have life-like eyes, which can open and close.

Some can pee and poo.

Some can pee and poo, yes. They are easy to evoke emotion with, no matter what situation you put it in. Some can pee and poo would make a great title, adding it to my list.

Well, you don’t just put it in any position, you break it’s back over a pink star.

That one is a kind of altar for dissociation.

I wanted to talk to you about the video work, I think the only one you ever exhibited, in your show On ne sait plus quoi penser du serpent qui a peur in Paris in 2019.

With the two brothers?

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Exactly, it gets me to thinking about how you process the imagery you consume digitally, specifically that of moving image. I consider your work very animated despite their object-hood, they don’t feel stagnant and there’s an energy and a non-linear narrative.

In an entire exhibition for me that’s where the narratives really start to appear, and I can tell you many stories about the works which can also change from one day to the next.

I was trying to get at whether or not your work is really addressing the world you encounter when you leave the house, you know? It’s not screentime, and I’d like to see how you’d make art out of your screentime, but with the same approaches you already employ.

The same way, in a very collaged approach. Layered images, sounds. It could also tend to anecdotic work in a way, I don’t know. Because there’s always a very shocking or new phenomena on social media, etc. I might focus too much on this kind of content as material and I don’t think it would come out as the best work, it would also destroy my mental health. But I’ve done some video work before, as you mentioned, and there are some works that I’ve never shown as well. Because it’s a more sporadic part of my practice I don’t really include it in my body of works, they’re not on my portfolio for instance. I feel my painting work is already very diverse, I wouldn’t want to create even more confusion. But maybe that’s silly! There’s this video I made recently about a Calabasas lifestyle magazine I found in Malibu but which I forgot at my friends place when flying back to Paris. I was really frustrated about it because I wanted to film my hands or anyone else’s browsing it. I saw the magazine and I knew immediately. Anyway, no mag no vid, but I found a digital copy of it on their website so that’s the video, a video of my screen with a fake sound of page browsing.

And you don’t have these problems when painting? How do you approach painting?

It really depends on my mood or project. What I usually answer to this question, and maybe that’s why it became my usual process, is that I plan out backgrounds with paint or fabric, zones. Then I add and add, whatever comes to mind really, intuitively, from silkscreen to objects, photos, wrapping paper, etc. It can also just be paint and when it is, it’s expressionist bush strokes, let’s say. That happens when I’m freaking out in the studio and get upset because my first idea didn’t come out as planned, so I let off steam on the canvas thinking: what the hell, fuck this, ending up not thinking anymore.

On one side are my experiences and knowledge, my ideologies, and on the other are my artworks. These are two separate worlds, and my imagination leaps back and forth between them. Logic doesn’t necessarily intervene in my creative process. While I’m working on my paintings, I’m thinking about their finality, which isn’t yet defined at this stage. It’s during this process that I find ideas by digging deep inside myself.

Do you write about your work at all? As a parallel practice?

In general, no, maybe I should? You know I go to therapy so maybe that’s why I don’t feel the urge.

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You speak to her about the work like, more than in a career sense?

Yeah, I mean I don’t show her pictures or anything, but I can say, for example, “at the moment I feel stuck because of this and that,” and it’s quite a difficult exercise to explain to someone who has no idea what my work looks like. Referring in my head to specific paintings I try to explain to her that this part needs to be printed and then this other part needs to be overlaid by this other thing bla-bla-bla. It can become oddly complicated with no imagery as indicator.

But also maybe she knows what my work looks like because she googled me. {laughs} I don’t know, I would have if I was her but maybe therapists are not allowed to do that.

I can imagine, you talk about your work really formally almost like it’s…

Logistics.

Exactly, but you think maybe she now understands your art language.

I don’t know, she’s always nodding along… And says most of the time “so you don’t see clearly.” {laughs}

Do you think you’ll make art forever?

There will never be a point I don’t make art. If I’m away from the studio for say, two weeks, and maybe it’s also because it’s my space, but I’ll really feel the urge to make something, think about it, and do whatever happens in the studio, not anywhere else. This has been the case for a very long time.

I can almost see that with everything you do, but I think artists should be asked this question more often… an antithesis of this Hans Ulbricht-Obrist “what are your unrealised project” question he signs every artist talk with.

I’ll be an artist forever, yes, that’s the answer. My Dad, my Mum, my Grandma, they all wanted to have artistic careers in some way, and they didn’t because they had children (my take, we never actually really spoke about it in these terms), and my parents are extremely supportive of anything I do and that’s where I think my confidence (work wise) comes from, but also I’m an only child with separated parents since a young age so it can come with a lot of pressure and attention, you know?

Actually, no. I’m also an only child and it’s exactly why I feel no pressure, no sibling comparisons or bullshit which I’ve heard about from friends, that’s all incredibly alien to me.

My parents really put in the work raising me regarding cultural aspects of life, but in a pretty heavy way. I mean it’s also that they were into it and slightly borderline, also into counterculture, so I guess to them it wasn’t shocking their child would try an art career with no money at stake. They’re a mix of hippy/punk and Nietzschean/Cartesian morals that probably came out as: we want our child to be happy above everything else. They are not the typical reasonable parents of their generation who wouldn't encourage their children with artistic ambitions because they’d be scared they wouldn’t make it out in life with such an unstable job.

I mean, if I had children I don’t even know if I would. Especially these days.

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Angélique Heidler (*1992) lives and works in Ivry-sur-Seine, France. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2015. Her intuitive painting practice is structured in conjunction with collage, sewing and various printing of images that echo the paradoxical dualities embedded in consumerism’s representations. She uses aesthetic references from the endless flux of media and marketing, most of the time to evoke the nuanced construction of identity and individuals. Recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions include: Salon International de la Peinture de Delme, CAC Synagogue de Delme, Delme, 2025; I <3 Artists & Oceans, Belmacz, London, 2025; Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, 2025; Silke Lindner, New York, 2025; I KNOW WHAT I DO (...); Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, 2024; Metallic K.O., Café des Glaces, Tonnerre, 2024; Gossips, Nir Altman, Munich, 2024; Zero Moment of Truth, Weiss Falk, Zürich, 2024; Target Group Show, Braunsfelder, Cologne, 2023; May My Fiction Rule, Chris Andrews, Montréal, 2022; In den Besten Jahren, Little, Bern, 2022; Love Letters .CHF, Stadtgalerie, Bern, 2021; Piselli, Bad Water, Knoxville, 2021; Your Friends and Neighbors, Hight Art, Paris, 2020; Softview/Privatissime, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, 2020. She has been in residency at Résidence de Lindre-Basse, CAC Synagogue de Delme, (FR, 2023), Stadtgalerie Bern, (CH, 2021), Villa Lena (IT, 2016). She was shortlisted for the 5th edition of the Révélations Emerige prize (2017, FR).

Kerri Cole (b. 1992, Chatham, UK) is an artist who currently lives and works in Berlin who’s work deals with representations of the built world and displacements of time via moving image, sound and photography. Recent exhibitions include Deichtorhallen Sammlung Falckenberg (2024, Hamburg), Chess Club (2024, Hamburg) & Salto (2022, Lisbon).

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