Wannes Goetschalckx

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.