This artist's book, a catalogue of a museum without walls, reads like an account of a work under construction in response to a commission in a former coalfield.
With this publication,
Joëlle Tuerlinckx guides us through the studio's archives, and through the development of a thought process and culminates in the inventory of the M.M. collection ("Musée de la Mémoire" or "Museum of Memory"). Building on the great classic of the inventory catalogue and encompassing "all of J.T.'s work", she presents "a museum in itself".
While the book is originally connected to "La Triangulaire de Cransac", a monumental work of art in the small town of Aveyron, it also puts into perspective the evolution of the museum in its relationship with the artist and the book. Joëlle Tuerlinckx reminds us that if the museum is compared to a book because of its internal organisation, then a book can be compared to a museum because of its systematics and its method of contemplating the object.
Awarded: Henry van de Velde 2024.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx (born 1958 in Brussels, Belgium) is a multi-media artist whose works pose as archival materials. Her visual vocabulary includes books, display cases, wall installations, video screens, and (not least) the exhibition rooms themselves. In her situation-specific presentations, she establishes a relationship between simple things and found objects, texts, drawings, her own earlier works, and film material rich with intertextuality. Through the application of different methods of transformation and an infinite system of references and quotes, she lets us experience space and time, present and past, memory and immediacy all on the same level. Tuerlinckx' s works are variable; they remain fixated only for a moment. They are subject to a permanent process of reconsideration and re-adaptation in which media categories and designations are continually subverted, leaving the works in an open process.
