Joëlle Tuerlinckx: La première fois

For several years, Joëlle Tuerlinckx kept a close eye on the construction of Kanal. With a light show and an explosive symphony of sounds co-created with Christoph Fink, she puts you under hypnosis and introduces you to the underground part of both the museum and her work. In the empty space, stories about foundations slowly blend with other tales.

For the opening of Kanal, Joëlle Tuerlinckx personally picked an exhibition space: the most underground, deep in the foundations of the museum. For several years, she kept a close eye on the building works: the pumping of groundwater into the canal, the construction of the walls, the pounding of hammers on site. In this way, she saw the space unfold for “the first time”. Now, she shares those first impressions with the public. Through “Light figures” that weave a universe of real and false time, and a sound composition co-created with artist Christoph Fink, she sends visitors through the room’s emptiness.

Two different lighting systems reveal the cavernous space: one casts a conventional museum light, while the other is more theatrical and plays with atmosphere, time and rhythm. Sometimes they overlap unexpectedly – like a solar eclipse – creating a choreography that summons, often with humour, the past and possible future of the space.

The silence is broken by announcements, alarms and other sounds: noises from the building site, or disorienting room descriptions and texts by Tuerlinckx, read by different voices in various languages. This polyphony transports visitors through the museum’s underground and the invisible foundations of Tuerlinckx’s art, as if under hypnosis. Meanwhile, the sound of water evokes the Brussels marshes, the proximity of the canal and the porous nature of this subterranean space.

This sense of permeability also blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, and between the artwork and what it relates. The soundtrack addresses the public directly: “That’s where I’ll take you, Visitor.”

Since the 1980s, Joëlle Tuerlinckx has been developing a body of work that is grounded in light and mutable materials. Her work is always deeply connected to the time and space in which it is realised and how visitors might experience them.