Just down the street from Geoffrey Farmer's East Vancouver studio, a few blocks south along a busy truck thoroughfare, another Vancouver artist has been preparing for the Venice Biennale. While Farmer, with his show A way out of the mirror, will represent Canada, Mike Bourscheid is in Venice for Luxembourg. Bourscheid is a permanent Canadian resident and, since 2012, a Vancouverite.
"It's an awesome work city if you're an artist," he says in his East Van studio, pointing out the presence of skilled craftspeople, facilities for artists, and a thriving film industry. "It's a making city. So I'm very happy to be here."
Bourscheid, 33, was born in Esch-sur-Alzette, in southern Luxembourg. His mother was a seamstress and his father a welder who plays the saxophone (currently in a brass band). Bourscheid came to Vancouver by way of Berlin and before that southern France. He left Luxembourg at 19 to attend the Université d'Aix Marseille. There he befriended a couple of exchange students from Berlin and followed them back to Germany, where he studied at the University of Arts Berlin. There he met Vanessa Brown, who was at the school on an exchange from Vancouver's Emily Carr University. ("I'm very lucky with exchange students," he says.)
Bourscheid moved to Canada in 2012 and he and Brown married in 2014; they live in the East Van neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant. When Bourscheid was working on his application for Venice – Luxembourg's competition was an open call – Brown, an artist who works primarily in sculpture, brought home the metaphorical bacon (and real fresh flowers – which they buy for a good price from a nearby, down-at-the-heels mall).
Performance is central to Mike Bourscheid’s practice, and his characters are often gender-fluid.
Bourscheid is a polyglot – he speaks English, French, German, Luxemburgish and Spanish. Performance is central to his practice, and his characters are often gender-fluid. He is a perpetual student. His first Vancouver studio was close to a leather store; there he taught himself how to work with leather. He watched YouTube videos as he was learning how to dye materials. He has borrowed fashion documentaries – and many books – from the library. More recently he was learning pottery at the kind of neighbourhood spot where parents take children for after-school classes and birthday parties.
At the time of our studio visit, Bourscheid was preparing the script for a video that will play at his Biennale exhibition, having recently completed a casting call for a parrot.
"I had to visit the parrots a couple times to get familiar with the parrot and then decide," Bourscheid explains. "Because not every parrot does certain things. For example, there was one parrot that would sit on here," – he points to his arm – "but he wouldn't sit on a rope that would hang on the costume. And also some parrots – they don't like you. It's a thing. They're like humans. They're super clever. And you can't fool them."
The successful applicant was a bird from Abbotsford named Quax. (The spelling of "Quax" was confirmed to me in an e-mail from Justina Bohach, Bourscheid's super-organized project manager who, lest there be any doubt about how tight the Vancouver visual art world can be, previously worked for Farmer; and before that, interned for Steven Shearer, the Vancouver artist who represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2011.)
Mike Bourscheid, Thank you so much for the flowers, 2017.
The action in the video takes place on a treadmill in a motel room. Bourscheid is wearing a costume he designed for himself and the parrot; Bourscheid plays a pirate character who turns into a cowboy. Dialogue between pirate/cowboy will only be seen as subtitles, he explains.
The video is one element of Bourscheid's Venice show, Thank you so much for the flowers – an eclectic-sounding, site-specific smorgasbord of ideas: performance, costumes, hanging systems for the costumes, carpets, walls painted and lit a particular way.
In the news materials, the exhibition is described as "a tribute to the expectations and mishaps of social etiquette. … Traces of the body emerge throughout the exhibition in the form of casts, reliefs, performances, videos and cookie-making." The show is meant to undulate with life, inspired by those living around it.
While the Canadian pavilion in Venice is located in the Giardini, Luxembourg's is housed in Ca' del Duca, a 15th-century apartment building in the San Marco area. The space – which Bourscheid had not seen until he was selected for the project – is an actual apartment, perpetually rented by Luxembourg for the architecture and art biennales. It is an inhabited building; there are people living upstairs.
Mike Bourscheid, This is how I imagine love, Sculpture, performance, vinyl album, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
Christian Mosar
Each area of the apartment will offer a different experience: visitors pass through a corridor lined with birch panels and antique wooden cookie moulds into a five-room apartment: one room will be lit in yellow and carpeted; Bourscheid pictures people sitting and reading in there. In another room looking out onto the canal, visitors will see the reflection of the water on the glossy white walls. One room will have potato prints on the walls. In the final room, visitors will encounter the parrot video, titled The wellbeing of things: A 5 km race.
Bourscheid will perform two works in the space: one on opening night he will reveal nothing about; and a second piece called The Goldbird Variations that he will perform for two weeks at the beginning and end of the Biennale. For this, he wears a golden get-up: cap, shirt, skirt – and yellow socks with brown sandals (perhaps the Vancouver influence). When he is not performing the work, the components will be on display and become sculpture. There is also a sound piece that can be heard throughout the room.
Bourscheid, who was nominated for the 2015 Robert Schuman art prize, has had solo shows at the Centre d'art Oeil de poisson in Quebec City, Gallery 295 in Vancouver and at galleries in Luxembourg and Munich. But the Venice Biennale offers a whole other level of profile and exposure.
Mike Bourscheid, The Oracle (working title), 2017.
Thank you so much for the flowers is organized by Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'Art Contemporain and curated by the Casino's director, Kevin Muhlen. The show's title speaks to Bourscheid's bifurcated life as a Luxembourger living in Canada. "Thank you so much" is something you hear all the time in Canada, he explains; it is common. But to his Luxembourgish ear, it is an over-the-top expression of gratitude. When you speak different languages, as Bourscheid does, you also take on different characters.
As Bourscheid gives life to his characters, he also aims to give life to the apartment/pavilion in Venice.
"I have to think of the people that come in and also make them have a story. Everybody that comes in will have their own story with different backgrounds. It's like if you go to somebody's apartment and you're invited for a glass of wine, sometimes you just walk through and you peek in and you imagine who it is. So it's a little bit like that."
The Venice Biennale runs May 13 to Nov 26.