LES FILMS EUX-MÊMES: JOËLLE TUERLINCKX PAR WILLEM OOREBEEK

In the work of Joëlle Tuerlinckx (1958) film, video, audio, installations and publications cannot be seen as separate categories but are porous and interwoven entities. To Tuerlinckx, art cannot be reduced to an external thing or sublimated into a concept. On the contrary, her work is an investigation into how art itself ‘thinks’; art, not as a representation or an expression, but as a situation. Her films and videos, a large majority of which will be presented in this show, are not structured from narrative lines, nor through parallel editing or dialectic of ideas, but from situations. Not as an objective entity, but as a ‘void’, or parataxis, in the form of nonhierarchical relations and constellations.

Her films and videos delineate fragments in infinitude, through shots recorded from the hip, edited in realtime. Duration is determined by the experience andconditions of the moment - reality is treated as a laboratory, as a natural choreography of image and sound. Tuerlinckx subject of investigation is her relationship to the image, not the image per se. Her basic material is time. She makes notches in time, through multiplication, intensification or subtraction – constructions that inevitably remain on a metaphorical level.

During the last years, argos has been digitally indexing and archiving the artist’s audiovisual oeuvre. This can be likened to an archive, like Borges’ library, which can’t be anything but infinite. The exhibition visualizes this archive as a complex and always evolving system of taxonomies, categories, compilations and themes, a rhizomatic multiplicity that could grow without limit. This continously evolving exhibition has been conceived as a collaboration with the artist Willem Oorebeek.