Luxembourg artist Mike Bourscheid reimagines narratives and gender norms with sculpture and performance. He discusses with Forbes his vision, influences, and the role of art today.
What are you currently working on? What are you preparing for work or as an exhibition?
At the moment, I’m going to have an exhibition called “Other Places” at the Sindelfingen Art Center, near Stuttgart, Germany, which will run until March 22, 2026. I am exhibiting at the Musée d’arts de Joliette, in Quebec (Canada), an exhibition called “Towards the Tyranny of the Real, Materiality and Exuberance Camp”, in video-performance.
Currently, I am also working on a performance, which I can put on thanks to the Francis-André grant of €10,000, which I received this year. It is a performance involving a ventriloquist accompanied by three or four mannequins or puppets. I wrote the story and the script and made the puppets and the ventriloquist’s costume. It is a love story about Snow White’s hunter and a bear.
More generally, children’s tales always highlight the masculinity of men, such as this virile hunter who is armed with a gun, and kills animals. The project revisits these stereotypes about the heterosexual norm, through a love story that can be more ambiguous, more fantastic and mysterious. In the performance, the hunter-ventriloquist will wear a custom suit with very long hair and over it a hunter’s outfit made of transparent organza fabric in a copper colour.
Does this story fit into your vision of art and the societal role of the artist?
Here too, I address the themes of masculinity and social roles, through exploration and questioning. If you create a work of art, a film or a play that tells a non-heteronormative story, you open the discourse and new doors. That’s what I do in my art. In general, I’m tired of always reading or seeing the same love stories. But love is broader than just these same stereotypes because there are many different views on love and life. My role as an artist is not to say how it should be lived, but only to give a point of view, my personal point of view, which interests me and how I imagine it. The rest is up to others to see and interpret.
“I’m tired of always reading or seeing the same love stories”
What is the role of the Nosbaum Reding Gallery in promoting your work or visibility?
This gallery is like a kind of manager, who is much more collegial. It gives me visibility on artistic events; They also contact private collectors, especially with the large collections that I, as a private person, could never access, or even banks, or large institutions.
How has Luxembourg supported you in your career, and in the development of your artistic visibility?
Luxembourg has supported me a lot, and it is still supporting me a lot at the moment. I had the chance to represent Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which brought me great visibility. And it was really nice, in terms of time and funding, to be able to work for 10 months on such a big project.
There are also great supports such as scholarships and subsidies in Luxembourg, which help a lot with the transport of works, travel costs, for example for exhibitions abroad. Then there are production grants from the Ministry of Culture and residencies abroad. Not to mention the Luxembourg gallery Nosbaum Reding, with which I have been working since 2018, and which opens its doors to collectors and exhibition venues in Luxembourg.
Who are the collectors?
There are a lot of museums, like Mudam, MNHA, Vancouver Art Gallery, etc. But also, institutions such as the Ministry of Culture, the city of Dudelange, arts centres… I think that a large number of cultural institutions in Luxembourg have one or more of my works. There are also many private collectors who are interested. Often, if institutions have collections of an artist, private collectors are often also interested in the artist and his work. Many of my works are also present in Canada, where I have lived for a long time. Other works are also with collectors in Paris, France, Belgium and Germany.
How was the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin a springboard for your career?
The Künstlerhaus Bethanien gave me the opportunity to live and have a studio in Berlin for six months, which is already great. The residency also offered an exhibition in their gallery during this residency period in order to promote the artistic project carried out during this residency. The chance to exhibit in such a prestigious venue in Berlin gives great visibility. In addition, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien invited curators to do studio visits and some of these visits led to exhibitions.
Which artists have inspired you the most, have served as a model and may still inspire you?
There are many writers who inspire me a lot at the moment, or who have always inspired me. There is Silvia Federici, for example, who inspires me. There are also classicists like Bruegel who inspire me a lot. There’s Alex Da Corte who is an American artist. As well as the Scottish poet and writer Ali Smith whom I adore. There are also the theatre directors René Pollesch and Christophe Marthaler, as well as the set and costume designer Anne Viebrock who really inspire me.
What would be your ultimate dream as an artist, something that you would like to achieve and that you may not be ready yet in terms of inspiration, design, realisation?
I dream of having exhibitions in many well-known institutions. It would be great to have a work at the Centre Pompidou after it reopens; exhibiting at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris would also be one of my biggest dreams. It would also be nice to have an exhibition at the Casino, in Luxembourg, because it’s a place that I love too. And why not exhibit at Art Basel with Nosbaum Reding? I have many dreams that are very different. I would also like to collaborate on a play with a theatre company, and to show it for example at the Volksbühne in Berlin. I finally dream of making a feature film, and why not, a horror film.
“I dream of having exhibitions in many well-known institutions”
This article was published in the 8th edition of Forbes Luxembourg.
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