Mike Bourscheid

Mike Bourscheid
Weeping Sand Castles

Opening: Thursday 12th September 2024, 17:00-21:00
in the presence of the artist

Solo show inaugurated during
RendezVous-Brussels Art Week
12.09.-15.09.2024

The exhibition Weeping Sand Castles is built upon storytelling—whether referencing small village gossip, clichés of the horror genre, or exploring the contemporary resonance of myths and fairy tales. Literary allusions serve as the blueprint for Mike Bourscheid’s visual language. Like a familiar melody guiding a musical improvisation, motifs are deconstructed, intermittently coming to the forefront or fading into the background, ultimately forming a new composition.

One of the motifs explored in the exhibition is the story of the Sirens. In classical literature, the Sirens faced their predicament as punishment for something beyond their control. When Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnapped Persephone, the Sirens were transformed into half-bird creatures and tasked with searching for her. However, they could never fulfill their purpose, and their immortality, along with their bodies, became their curse. Hurt and lost, they would settle in the sea luring men to their demise with the promise of knowledge and pleasure in their songs. In Homer’s Odyssey, forewarned of the encounter, Odysseus orders his crew to plug their ears with beeswax, while he himself chooses to listen to the Sirens’ enchanting melodies, bound to the mast of his ship, desperate to break free from his bonds to meet them.

Although in the original tales the Sirens' songs seemed to appeal more to the spirit, promising to fulfill the deep longings of the men who encountered them, later interpretations increasingly suggest they evoked sexual desires. With the rise of the Catholic faith, their depictions transformed from birds with female heads to seductive female bodies with animalistic features, such as wings or fishtails. They became associated with sin, joining the array of dangerous women of biblical origin, with Eve foremost among them. Mike Bourscheid depicts Sirens in a series of wooden sculptures that blend mythological attributes with elements of Catholic iconography, incorporating candles, as well as animalistic and crucifix-like features into their bodies' composition. Meanwhile, the Sirens enter Eve’s garden in two large-scale textile works, where their paper cut-out bodies are intertwined with elements that further merge these two iconographic worlds – snakes, fishes, birds, flowers, bones, burning bushes and red apples, some bitten by hungry mouths.  

The moralising nature of the Catholic tradition may be seen as a contributing factor to much of the shame, guilt, and sense of forbiddance that we experience regarding our (gendered) bodies. In his work, Mike Bourscheid explores the implications of the body – often his own – questioning various modes of embodiment. What can the (extended) body teach us? How do we inhabit a body that feels uncomfortable? And how can vulnerability be embodied? In the exhibition, a costume based on the hunter from the tale of Snow White is created using a pattern found in an old magazine. Dressed in sheer fabrics, the character appears unarmed, vulnerable and transparent, in contrast to the way he was depicted in the original literary source.

The artist’s name, Bourscheid – translating to a castle built on a river split – serves as a pun that permeates Weeping Sand Castles. On the lower level of the gallery, an interior of a castle is created. Barred windows on the walls enclose the screams of foul mouths, while the ground contains a small town of stained-glass homes that house plants, each a character in itself. This setup highlights the mouth and the throat, and their connection not only to breath, thus to life, but also to language – which functions quite like the body does. Just as we exist in the body, we also exist within language, which structures our sense of self in the symbolic order. Both the body and language are sites of pleasure and pain, both enable and constrain us, and both are key to understanding the ways we are embodied and enmeshed in the fabric of our existence.

 -- Anna Laganovska

Image:
Mike Bourscheid
When singers became lovers (Kelsey), 2024
Oiled oak with walnut and beech details
203 x 101 x 20 cm
© Courtesy of the artist