Joelle Tuerlinckx

Joëlle Tuerlinckx was born in 1958 in Brussels, Belgium.
She has participated internationally in numerous major and group exhibitions, including 2018 Generali Foundation—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, 2017 Sculpture. Projects Münster, Germany, 2014 Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2005 Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp Netherlands and Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany, 2008 Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria, 2004 Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea, 2003 Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium, 2002 Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany, 2000 Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Solo exhibitions, including 2013 Haus der Kunst (HdK) Munich, Germany, who dedicated a major retrospective to her, among others, 2006 The Drawing Center, New York, USA, 2006 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 2005 The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada, 2003 The Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, USA, 2001 Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 1999 Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium, 1999 Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium, 1994 Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Tuerlinckx has taught at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels, at HEAD in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands.
In 2007, the artist received the Plantin Moretus Award; in 2008, she was awarded the Cultuurprijzen Vlaanderen, Netherlands, for visual arts; and in 2011, the Fernand Baudin Prize for Book Design. In 2018, the artist was awarded an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium, for the Department of Architecture and Art. Joëlle Tuerlinckx lives and works in Brussels.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx offers a critical and poetic investigation of, among other things, the institutions of art: galleries, museums, exhibition halls, and their spaces and forms, such as showcases, labels, frames, curatorial and administrative structures, and all of their various materials, from lending contracts to catalogues. Her work thereby follows in the tradition of renowned fellow Belgian artist, Marcel Broodthaers. The artist works with found material, marks out measurements of walls and constellations of objects, doubles spaces in the form of models, sets artificial shadows alongside natural ones through the use of lighting, adds an extra page to catalogues on which simply the word “page” appears (albeit crossed out), and causes museum’s to open at night. The term she coined, “Stretching,” stands for the strategy of targeted manipulation of exhibition situations, disturbing expectations, and expanding the known area (of action) in order to thereby achieve the greatest possible sensitization of beholders’ awareness. Tuerlinckx does not create objects that can be shown in an exhibition space, but instead, produces situations that create awareness of the place where they occur. Many works move at the border of visibility, are at the threshold, about to disappear, the fine line between object and void. Opening this void is fundamental for the artist as she thereby aims to transform sites to poetic locations of possible realizations. Her measurements and markings appear as elements of an inexplicable symbolic system whose own production of meaning seems to be constantly collapsing, and at the same time, jolting established categorizations.