Belgian artist Wannes Goetschalckx explores the emotional and physical, and the ideological and imaginative, in relation to the body and space. His practice combines videos, objects and performance actions in sculptural settings that are occupied, probed and altered by Goetschalckx’s own intervention.

By posing physical and mental challenges to his own mind and body, his work aims to reveal to the viewer both the immediately apparent and also the hidden and psychic constraints that bear on human life. The coexistence of comfort and pain, exposure and enclosure, and cage and shelter are frequent denominators in his practice.

For Touched, Goetschalckx has developed a multi-channel video installation comprising short films depicting the artist engaged in everyday actions and rituals within a minimal wooden space. Performed in hermetic solitude, Goetschalckx’s actions reflect upon the behavioural possibilities and rituals that might be enacted by a single human being or creature ‘in captivity’. The setting of the videos reappears in modified form within the gallery as a space for activity and contemplation where visitors can experience a ‘warm’ shelter, acting as a counterpoint to the ‘cold’ white cube presentation of the video installation. The title of the work, 1 WITHOUT, alludes to the composite of words and meanings within Goetschalckx’s spoken language – in Dutch ‘wit’ means ‘white’ and ‘hout’ means ‘wood’ – while also referencing the ‘empty’ twelfth plinth that forms part of the installation and that becomes an occasional platform for live interventions by the artist.

Peter Gorschluter

Wannes Goetschalckx is part of Touched at Tate Liverpool:
Albert Dock, L3 4BB
Open: Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–17.50
Closed Mondays (except Bank Holiday Mondays)
Tel: +44 (0) 151 702 7400 www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
Free Entry / Fully Accessible

Liverpool Biennial presents
Touched, the International 10 exhibition as part of Liverpool Biennial 2010
18 September - 28 November 2010

“In a world packed with countless biennials, triennials and the rest, this madcap event in Liverpool remains distinctive and entertaining. The shows are scattered all over the city, often in pretty strange places, but the overall ambition — to introduce British audiences to up-and-coming international artists and trends — is adhered to excellently." The Times

“Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”¹
Touched presents artworks that affect the viewer through addressing a total context (mind, body and place: relatedness in space and time); artworks whose investment and inscription in the particular and the personal affects the general and the social.
As with the last four International exhibitions for Liverpool Biennial, Touched will consist of newly commissioned artworks made with sensitivity to the specifics of the place, time and audience of the exhibition, while originating in the artists’ preoccupations with the state of the world and with their own personal obsessions. This is articulated in the concept of ‘emplacement’, expanding the more common idea of embodiment. “While the paradigm of ‘embodiment’ implies an integration of mind and body, the emergent paradigm of ‘emplacement’ suggests the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment.”²
While the word Touched suggests the contiguity and bodily presence that is involved in emplacement, it equally conjures the dynamic of affectivity in which the viewer is presented (brought to the present moment) with the artwork equally through the senses, intellect and emotions. This quality of presence starts with affect. Once our emotions are engaged, the resultant disruption to our senses and thought processes makes change possible in our intellectual perspective, behaviour and relation to the world.
This is not to conflate difference. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, the apparent divergence between mind and body, subject and object, self and other is a necessary condition for the constitution of subjectivity. And that is the same difference as exists between touching and being touched, between looking and being looked at, or between the sentient and the sensible.

Both in physical and emotional terms, touched and touching are not simply ‘separate orders of being in the world’, but reversible conditions, coexisting in constant oscillation as in his famous example of one hand touching the other. Perhaps crucially The Visible and the Invisible is an exercise to leave questioning open, not to reconstitute the subject apart from the object, the other, but to exist in and experience the ontological ambiguity of the ‘flesh’ as both object and subject, body and world, art and city.
Can art touch a city?
1. Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag, 1966.
2. Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, published Berg 2005 p. 7

Press Release: ON DEMAND

Includes work by Yael Bartana, Sema Bekirovic, Martha Colburn, Helmut Dick, Elspeth Diederix, Willehad Eilers, Alicia Framis, Wannes Goetschalckx, Witte van Hulzen, Witte van Hulzen & Sander Breure, Sina Khani, Emi Kodama, Gabriel Lester, Kristjan Lodmfjord, Cristina Lucas, Marjolijn van der Meij & Arianna Olthaar, Erkka Nisinnen, Paulien Oltheten, Bradley Pitts, Muzi Quawson, Frederik van Simaey, Jennifer Tee, Erik Wesselo, Nina Yuen. From 27 February through 3 April tegenboschvanvreden will be showing a video program involving the work of twenty-four artists. ON DEMAND has developed from the idea that, although the moving image has now acquired a substantial position in the art world, a large segment of the public has many questions about how to 'deal with' the moving image. How does one look at a video work? What does its aspect of time imply for the viewer? What does it mean to purchase a video work? How can video works be shown in a collection? What exactly is the stance taken by video art, or media art in general, with respect to today's concern for 'open source' access, for YouTube, Twittering and blogging, for social networks and interactivity? Throughout the exhibition, we will be focusing on the significance of video art today by way of several lectures to be given by specialists and collectors of video art.

The exhibition is, of course, primarily about looking. Visitors can make their own selections from a wide variety of individual artworks and then see that choice displayed on a large screen. Never had the opportunity to view a work by Helmut Dick or Gabriel Lester? Always wanted to watch a film by Erik Wesselo, Frederik van Simaey, Nina Yuen, Sina Khani or Sema Bekirovic? Well, here's your chance...ON DEMAND.

By way of this exhibition, tegenboschvanvreden is pursuing the aim to hold collaborative projects with other galleries. For ON DEMAND we invited six galleries—all of them having earned a reputation for creating a platform for video art/new media—to select a number of video works by artists from their own galleries and to show these in conjunction with the work being presented at tegenboschvanvreden. We should therefore like to thank Annet Gelink Gallery, galerie Fons Welters, galerie Sign, galerie Diana Stigter, galerie Juliette Jongma and galerie West for their contributions to this exhibition!

Invited by: bolwerK
In de Invited by- serie nodigt Z33 een jonge curator uit om een tentoonstelling in Z33 te maken.

Nepotists, opportunists, freaks, friends and strangers intersecting in the grey zone is een project waarin rol -bepalingen, -vervagingen, -verschuivingen binnen en buiten de kunst kruisen. De mise-en-scène in Z33 wordt een mise-en-action waarin de kunstenaar, de bezoeker of het publiek op haar/zijn aanwezigheid, eigen verantwoordelijkheid en potentiële handelen in relatie tot zichzelf en anderen wordt aangesproken. De onbepaalde zone breekt in vorm en structuur buiten het kader van de klassieke presentatieplekken. Zo wordt de witte of zwarte box, grijs of gekleurd, en altijd veranderlijk.