Dialling Into the Void: Kenneth Heslop’s NELEVEN Portal
Tucked in an alcove in the upstairs galleries at NAGB, faint glow emanates from the darkness. Your curiosity draws you, and you encounter a makeshift phonebooth. A blue light illuminates the words “Customer Service”, and inside you see phone numbers on a screen. This is the framing of a surreal and darkly humorous experience by Grand Bahama based multimedia artist Kenneth Heslop.
The work is part of NELEVEN: INTO THE VOID, where Heslop explores the idea of the void through technology and communication. Titled In the void I ask you to venture, you who have wandered this way, the structure of Heslop’s installation is reminiscent of an old Batelco phone booth. Through its use, it becomes a portal to another dimension, referencing both past, present, and future. While the frame of “phone booth” is old-school, a digital screen allows you to interact with the piece by inputting numbers as if dialling a phone. You might become frustrated, though, when your inputs lead nowhere. A message says, “If you are trying to find [this work’s] meaning, press 101010”. But when you dial the numbers, it takes you through an endless but futile journey, ultimately ending with an error message.
Heslop is directly referencing technology and the ubiquitous 404 error message we encounter when a link is broken, but even more so, he’s referencing how technology is changing the way we connect with each other. Heslop recalls a recent online banking experience: “I was trying to speak to a real person, but instead I was sent around in computer generated circles, and connecting to a real person became increasingly difficult.”
The work also speaks to a kind of solitude and loneliness – the frustration of not feeling seen or head. Yet, I can’t help but see hope in it: People would use phone booths to connect to loved ones, nestled in the comfort of the booth alone but simultaneously feeling joy, delight, or grief during their conversation. There is something deeply human about that because it’s something we’re all familiar with – the need to connect. That was one of the main goals of curators Richardo Barrett and Letitia Pratt with NELEVEN: to not think of the void as just a place of nothingness, but one of endless possibility and expansion.
The placement of Heslop’s booth is significant, too. Tucked into a corridor of this historic building, it feels almost site-specific – an in-between space where you pause and gather or get lost in your thoughts. It’s the perfect location for a portal, a threshold between one place and another. In this intimate alcove, the work invites you to linger and to search for connection, even if your dials lead you astray.
Heslop’s tongue-in-cheek critique of automated systems is contrasted nicely with Ryan Lewis’s Junkanoo series. Lewis used generative AI – not without deep consideration – to push his practice into new terrain. While Heslop satirises the void left by automated customer service loops, Lewis dives into the void of AI itself, wrestling with what it means to create when the tools have their own agency. Both artists are asking: How much control do we surrender when we use technology? And what do we find when wandering into the unknown?
