Joëlle Tuerlinckx
This year, we are continuing to conduct our Interviews on Art according to the same principle: exploring the broader scope of a practice through its borders, and thus inviting artists to reveal to us what lies outside their scope. The notions of borders and scope immediately take a meaningful turn with our first guest of the season, Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Her two latest ongoing projects, one at the Centre international d’art et du paysage in Vassivière and the other at Dia:Beacon in New York, are perfect examples.
The artist always begins a project by precisely observing the spaces in which it will take place. As she explains: “The best point of view for seeing a space are its borders, not the center”. Tuerlinckx the pacer and stroller, and something of a paleontologist, is like a surveyor with no instruments who sees what no one else sees.
La Constellation du peut-être in Vassivière shatters the site’s centered configuration by being mostly installed outside Aldo Rossi and Xavier Fabre’s building. This is signaled by a yellow fluorescent marking on the ground ironically called Aldo ou le Point zéro (Aldo or Ground Zero): the artist makes this narrative architecture and its dominant position on the island into her project’s “ground zero”. In the woods, the fields and even in the lake, she has scattered discreet works that constitute so many point of view on the a particular situation. By inviting the visitor on a treasure-hunt stroll, she links institutional criticism and leisure play.
This Constellation is perfectly representative of a way of working (simultaneously considering the work and its location) that usually leads the artist “to turn the situation inside-out like a glove”. For Tuerlinckx, a production does not consist of a finished object that is placed in a receptacle-space. It is always linked to a preexisting situation: a place, institution, museum or gallery—a specific space but also a specific time, that of the exhibition. She is thus interested in the Exhibition Moment as a Space Moment[1] that is experienced and discovered by walking. Quite obviously the artist does not forget art’s key figure, the viewer, mobile bodies and eyes that assemble the work exhibited in Absolutely the Present[2].
At Dia:Beacon in New-York, she recently created the performance That’s it! and a film at the same time. As illustrated by the drawing below, the project is based on the question of scope and what lies out of scope. Visitors to the Dia entered into the scope of a creation and representation conceived as a vision machine.
So going out of scope takes us to the heart of Tuerlinckx’s art, which interlinks the studio, the exhibition, reality, or work, language and the world, as the title of her retrospective trilogy visually expressed like concrete poetry: WOR(L)(D)(K) IN PROGRESS?. The parentheses, which change place for each exhibition, stress one word or the other[3]. The caesura they mark reflect a rhythmic dynamic, an energy: art.
Tuerlinckx solicits a wide variety of perception regimes to which she gives shape—precise, stratified, mobile shape. Conceptual and sensitive, her art is rooted in the present, a present made of and studded with maybes. It involves an enduring world that precedes it and will continue when it is over, because as the artist says, borrowing Serge Daney’s words: “The show has always already started”.
Biography
Joëlle Tuerlinckx is represented by Nagel Daxter Gallery in Germany and nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Gallery in Austria.
Currently, the Centre international d’art et du paysage on the island of Vassivière hosts La Constellation du peut-être, and the artist just realized the project That’s it ! at Dia:Beacon Foundation in New York.
Among her solo exhibitions in major international cultural institutions, we could mention : the Kunstmuseum Basel/Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland (2016); the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2013); the Arnolfini, Bristol, United Kingdom (2013); the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium (2012); the Reina Sofia, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid, Spain (2009); the Drawing Center, New York City, New York (2006); the MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland (2004); The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (2003); the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2001); The Frac Champagne Ardenne, France (1999) ; and Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1994).
Joëlle Tuerlinckx contributed to the Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 2014; the Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2003; and the documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany in 2002. She was also part of the « Skulptur Projekte Muenster » show in 2017.
[1] Several of the artists exhibitions, readings and books have titles that include “Moment”.
[2] Le Présent Absolument (Absolutely the Present) was the title of an exhibition at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna (26.04.08 – 28.06.08)
[3] WOR(LD)K IN PROGRESS? (Wiels, Brussels, 2012), WORLD(K)IN PROGRESS? (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2013-14), WOR(L)D(K) IN PROGRESS? (Arnolfini, Bristol, 2013).
