Kfda 2014: Tim Etchells

(© Bea Borgers)

With no fewer than three projects based on fragments of text, the work of the British (performance) artist Tim Etchells is well represented in this year’s Kunstenfestivaldesarts. In his “And for the Rest” poster campaign, he offers a place in the debate about society to Brussels illegals and homeless people who are kept out of the voting process on 25 May.

Make every Sunday a Car-Free Sunday in Brussels” and “Paint all the buildings in the city in different colours” are just two of the many slogans that will adorn the streets of Brussels over the next few pre-election weeks. Tim Etchells, who has attracted attention in recent years primarily with his socially critical neon works and performances about text and language, distilled a number of brief statements from conversations he carried out with people who are excluded from the political debate. The only place where you won’t see his slogans is on the official election hoardings. “They vary from simple, direct demands for social change to more poetic, unrealistic statements that are more in the nature of fantasy or asking for the impossible,” says Etchells of the results of his research on the streets. “Those impossible demands are not going to be on anybody’s political agenda, but they do raise questions about how we think about public discussions and they form a poetic challenge, suggesting that the debate should be expanded and reconsidered.”

What struck you most in your conversations with people who won’t be able to vote?
Tim Etchells: The urge for freedom. Sans-papiers, especially, are in a very distinctive political reality. It’s not surprising that they want to move around freely. But it soon became clear that, like us, they are stuck in a particular pattern of thought. If you challenged them to think and express themselves differently, then they too came to realise that you can’t take their freedom of thought away from them. So the project mainly raises questions about the limits we impose on ourselves in the way we think and about how we always express ourselves in terms of what is possible.

How does the “Order Cannot Help You Now” exhibition at Argos fit in with the project?
Etchells: The exhibition includes one new neon work. Mirror Pieces has three central themes: political delusions, optical illusions, and poetical confusions. They sound the same, but each is about perceptions that turn out to be misperceptions. I delved into the Argos archives in order to fish out works that both have a political agenda and raise questions about the way in which language frames and articulates our demand for change.

Video art by the Brussels artist Sven Augustijnen is prominent. Why him?
Etchells: His work embodies exactly what I have just been talking about. He lets three very contentious statements flash up repeatedly on video monitors: “Le Coran, ça je ne connais pas”, “L’Holocaust n’est qu’un détail dans l’Histoire” and “Le jour de gloire est arrivé” It creates a strange, unsettling dynamic that places us in an awkward position. In putting this exhibition together and also in my own work, I go looking for uncomfortable situations in which you, as a viewer, have to clarify things yourself and thus do the actual work.

The performance A Broadcast/Looping Pieces is the most personal project of the three.
Etchells: Over the last fifteen years I have built up a depository on my laptop of fragments of language that I found worthwhile. I have cut those fragments up and, live, I stick them together again on the boards in a sort of remix. The project arose from my collaboration in Brussels with the choreographer Boris Charmatz and conversations with the Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui; as in the poster project and the exhibition, the idea is to show what happens when things are taken out of their context. At best, viewers give free rein to their imagination and start to think and to ask questions themselves.

And for the Rest 15/4 > 24/5, posters in the city; Order Cannot Help You Now 3/5 > 29/6, We > Su 11 > 18.00, €3/5, Argos; A Broadcast/Looping Pieces 6 & 7/5, 20.30, €8/12, Kaaistudios

KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS • 2 > 24/5, Verschillende locaties/Divers lieux/Various locations, festival centre/box office: Cinema Marivaux, boulevard Adolphe Maxlaan 98, Brussel/Bruxelles, 070-22.21.99, www.kunstenfestivaldesarts.be