The Power Plant

(no Rest. no Room. no Things. no Title)

VOLUMES of SPACE 'The Power Plant WALL ATLAS scale 1:1' REAL WHITE THINGS BLACK MENTAL THINGS RESCUED OBJECTS series from the fire 3 MISTAKES for the fire! NEGATIVE DRAWINGS on newspapers (summer 2005) RETROSPECTIVE of WALL PIECES 1994–2005 ONE VOID ROOM ONE 'NOW ROOM' ((NO END))

Building on a legacy established by her compatriot Marcel Broodthaers, Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx works in the vein of institutional critique. Her practice, however, is distinguished by its ephemeral, transient and contingent nature.

Her installations comprise choreographies of found and handmade objects, manipulations of gallery lighting or framed shafts of sunlight, film and slide projections, penciled graffiti text and marks, paper "screens” and scattered card or paper shapes that the artist describes as "confetti.” The artist’s considered placement of these objects in the exhibition space lifts them from the ordinary, often throwaway status they occupy in real time. Instead, her environments become a theatre of things that compress and expand the viewer’s experiences of time, scale and light to heighten and disorientate perception.

Tuerlinckx has said: "When I am offered an exhibition space it is as though I receive a kind of parcel, a packet of air."

In her Toronto exhibition, Tuerlinckx will show a number of interrelated works, among them a large inventory of ephemera from the artist’s previous exhibitions whose rigorous cataloguing and minute description belie the fact the actual "objects" can be inconsequential scraps – invitation cards from the gallery’s other exhibitions for example – or things that are simply not there at all. For Tuerlinckx, the nature of exhibition craft can engender a disquieting mistrust in one’s preconceptions, accompanied by the slow realization that what one thought was "gallery" has been appropriated as "art."

A centrepiece for Tuerlinckx’s exhibition will be a book created in the weeks leading up to the opening on September 24. The book is constructed with paper that has been first stapled to the all the surfaces of The Power Plant’s exhibition walls, then removed, cut and bound. The project effectively transcribes The Power Plant, making an “atlas in 1-to-1 scale of the gallery.” This encyclopedia will be available to "read" by gallery visitors for the exhibition’s duration. In Tuerlinckx’s words “the best part of space is not its centre…the best part of space is its edge…this is the ‘crust’ of space.” Here a book is more than an informational vehicle: it is a sculptural casting, a physical relief map. For Tuerlinckx, architectural space is of equal importance to its contents.

Tuerlinckx will also showcase a number of objects in collaborative relation to Geoffrey Farmer’s exhibition. She has proposed "rescuing" a few pieces of wood from Farmer’s A Pale Fire. These will be painted white and installed in vitrines, showcased alongside three books of Tuerlinckx’s. These "mistakes" were error filled early printings of an ambitious artist’s book Tuerlinckx developed for inclusion in documenta 11 anthologizing all of the texts written on or for her exhibition practice. Tuerlinckx saved these initial printings and will burn (or singe) each of them in Farmer’s fireplace before installing them in vitrines.

1 Catherine Wood, “Stories of O,” Afterall, no. 10, London, p. 11.
2 Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Cahier #2, text accompanying exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 1994.
3 Tuerlinckx in “Borderline Notes,” notes accompanying her inclusion in the exhibition Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 2000.