JOËLLE TUERLINCKX - AUDIO AND VISUAL DAYS. JOURNAL DE JOURS

The exhibition Audio and Visual Days Journal de jours showed for the first time the whole video works of Joëlle Tuerlinckx together. This exhibition held in argos was conceived by the artist as a possibility to build in space (both space of the exhibition and space of an artist’s book) a material shown in past exhibitions only partially or associated with other works (monitors harm-hung in a room for sculptures, broadcast during lectures…). As mentioned in the title, Audio and Visual Days aimed to redefine what is usually called the ‘audiovisuals’ that is to say not a specific medium but a raw material of sound and image which has the same importance than other materials she uses. Joëlle Tuerlinckx let her films exist in their entire length of recording without any editing work. This exhibition was like all Tuerlinckx’s exhibitions an act of transformation: here the dates introduced between each shot made the videos correspond each other visually but also temporally, according to a unit of organisation by day. Shooting is a way for Joëlle Tuerlinckx to perceive the time interval included between two points she names ‘between a and a’, a space that could cover many different realities. As her whole work is, she is not interested in the proper object but in the trajectory leading to its realisation. In the case of video, this object is a time concentration that Joëlle Tuerlinckx tries to perceive in the more direct possible way, free hand, from its beginning to its end, whatever mobile these comings (‘avancées’). ‘I observe how these spaces come to me (…) In fact I observe how space crosses human kind and how human kind contains these blocks of time that are contained themselves or overrun these spaces. I work to understand the phenomenon of time metric, more than measuring or evaluating these spaces.’

The exhibition was structured into several levels or slices (‘couches’) of meaning. In the large room, a design made of marks on the floor linked the different films physically, and the structure by day could sometimes join in filigree (‘en filigrane’) the organisation by film types ( Abstract film, Work poem, Sculpture-film, Block of reality…). Close visible when the visitor sat at the table, or far when he/she walked in the argos space, the films got their meaning one regarding the other. In this organisation tentative, thought the same way than some of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s works are built (the alternation of ‘black moments’ in one Abstract film, the interludes in the Archive images-films, the still images of the Films TV …), the moments of absence or derive of perception were complementary to the continuous and clear (‘nette’) vision. On the contrary, on the first floor each film could be viewed separately and entirely, as a way to give them again their initial pre-exhibition status.

The third level of meaning is a book of 784 pages that Joëlle Tuerlinckx considers as a ‘volume’, like a sculpture made of images and texts written by her. The book was presented in its state of layout on one of the tables of the large room, the pages first planed for images were let empty, except post-it and annotations letting the reader refer to the images on monitors in the actual room. It was only months after the exhibition had ended that the blanks were filled with the images and that the ‘volume’ was available in its finished version. The book entitled Joëlle Tuerlinckx. autour de FILM.CINEMA. EXPOSITIONS. PROJECTIONS 1982. 1985. 1986. 1987. 1988. 1990. 1991. 1992. 1993. 1994. 1995. 1996. 1997. 1998. 1999. 2000, is published by argos editions and Merz, with the collaboration of Cera Foundation (B), Le Collège/FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (F) and Marres in Maastricht (NL).