With self-effacing playfulness, Mike Bourscheid's costumes, altered domestic objects, musical pieces and performances recount cryptic stories about gender identification, familial inheritance and cultural history. Always, Bourscheid's work seeks to transform traditional understandings of art's role in our daily lives, from our loves to our routine work.
Raised in southern Luxembourg by a seamstress mother and a welder father, Mike Bourscheid often uses performance and sculpture to interweave stereotypes of masculine and feminine labor. Here, the Luxembourg pavilion provides a uniquely hospitable atmosphere for this intimate approach. Each of the pavilion's five rooms unfolds its own enigmatic narrative. Upon entering the pavilion, viewers will pass through a long corridor lined with birch panels and antique wooden cookie molds - a preface to multiple curious tangles of familial and social custom.
Mike Bourscheid, born in 1984 in Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), studied at the Université d'Aix-Marseille (France) and Universität der Künste Berlin (Germany). Today, he lives and works in Luxembourg and in Vancouver, Canada. Recent exhibitions include: Access Gallery Vancouver (Canada), Nanaimo Art Gallery (Canada), Centre d'art L'OEil de Poisson in Quebec City (Canada) and Centre d'art Nei Liicht in Dudelange (Luxembourg). In 2015 he was nominated for the Prix d'art Robert Schuman; in 2010 he won the IBB-Preis für Fotografie.