2019 – IN KUNSTHAL GENT: La Fabrique d’un Single screen
The sequences in the exhibition at Kunsthal Gent – projected or on monitors – are accompanied by objects and sculptures specially made for this presentation (e.g. a sound-sensitive light, a ‘divine flame’ on the ceiling of the church space) or spatial interventions that are intended to evoke the memory of Dia:Beacon’s world-famous collection (e.g. a line version of Heizer’s dazzling work North East South West on a 1:1 scale, or the red carpet in the hallway of Kunsthal that refers to Walter de Maria’s 360˚ I Ching/64 Sculptures) – milestones in American art history firmly or dream-like imprinted on us, but relentlessly and ghost-like accompanying every artist.
The title of this exhibition, La Fabrique d’un Single screen, speaks for itself: the editing of the film will be done live, on the spot, in the presence of the audience, by VJs – i.e. by various THAT’s IT! actors and musicians, and sometimes also by the audience or the employees of Kunsthal Gent. Each of these one-and-a-half-hour VJ sessions will be supplemented by live voice-overs, singing, subtitling or commentary. Once again, time is rampant. Tuerlinckx interweaves real and fictional times, creating – under tight artistic control – a disarray of footage shot in Beacon at different points in time. She moves the Dia collection to Kunsthal Gent as a live memory performance, nourished by her own rich visual archive and by the artist Christoph Fink’s sound archive. It’s a tangle, a multiple way of thinking which disrupts the linearity of the Hollywood (i.e. American) story.
La Fabrique d’un Single screen will lead to different versions of The Single screen: the film as a stream of images and sounds, as a never-ending beginning, the film as a report… At the end of the process, there will be an ensemble of unique standard-length one-and-a-half-hour-long feature films on the table, in this case literally in a golden showcase.
How much closer can the making of an artwork, of a film, be brought to the public than by doing it live, in the presence of the public? How much more can the artist’s studio merge with the public space of an institution? Of all the works in the THAT’S IT! series so far, La Fabrique d’un Single screen is Tuerlinckx’s most central artistic attempt to close the circle between the studio (the creation) and the exhibition space (the presentation of the artwork), between the mental and the physical space. In La Fabrique d’un Single screen both coincide, and their relationship reverses.
And what better place for this spectacle than Kunsthal Gent, an organization housed in a former monastery with the DNA of both a workspace and a presentation space? The old-fashioned Flemish “kerkfabriek” (fabric committee, lit. “church factory”), the public institution managing the church’s resources in order to give form to the spiritual, is reversed in Tuerlinckx’s “film factory”: La Fabrique as a public institution managing the artist’s spiritual-artistic capital, in order to give form to it materially.
After the project in Kunsthal Gent, Tuerlinckx will take THAT’S IT! Dia:Beacon to a next level. In 2020 during the presentation of The Single Screen at the S.M.A.K. Ghent and at Dia:Beacon, Tuerlinckx will restart the dialogue with art pieces of the collection of both museums.
- Text: Ulrike Lindmayr, september 2019
