source: timelinesartsynet
Wannes Goetschalckx combines video, objects, and performance into works that force him to exceed his physical and mental limits, often resulting in pain or total exhaustion. His work frequently addresses comfort, pain, exposure, privation, and enclosure. These site-specific works have ideological relationships to the spaces they are enacted in; tension exists between the works’ ephemeral qualities and the commercial and institutional spaces in which the performances occur. In Toothpick (2011-2012), he installed a massive poplar in a space in the Casino Luxembourg. Over the course of his lengthy residency, he carved the tree down to the form of a toothpick without the use of industrial tools.
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source: artsynet
Wannes Goetschalckx combines video, objects, and performance into works that force him to exceed his physical and mental limits, often resulting in pain or total exhaustion. His work frequently addresses comfort, pain, exposure, privation, and enclosure. These site-specific works have ideological relationships to the spaces they are enacted in; tension exists between the works’ ephemeral qualities and the commercial and institutional spaces in which the performances occur. In Toothpick (2011-2012), he installed a massive poplar in a space in the Casino Luxembourg. Over the course of his lengthy residency, he carved the tree down to the form of a toothpick without the use of industrial tools.
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source: biennial
Belgian artist Wannes Goetschalckx (b.1978, Belgium) 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 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 reflected upon the behavioural possibilities and rituals that might be enacted by a single human being or creature ‘in captivity’. The setting of the videos reappeared in modified form within the gallery as a space for activity and contemplation where visitors could 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, alluded 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 formed part of the installation and that became an occasional platform for live interventions by the artist.