Ann Veronica Janssens Are You Experienced?

Ann Veronica Janssens’s work is fully predicated on the margins of perception. Ranging from work into the transformation of architectural space to a search for the physiological thresholds of vision, Janssens advocates a simplification of the gaze that coincides with the growing interest of contemporary practices for the cognitive exploitation of ways of perception of the sentient world.

Janssens’ early works from the mid 1980s can be framed within the spatial reconfiguration of architecture. Parts of constructions that interfere in a space in situ as interstices revealing the reverse of the demarcation of the frame. These installations, often bordering on a minimalist vernacular, were “spatial extensions of existing architecture”, what she calls “super spaces”, “the spaces surrounding a given space, spaces without space, places for the capture of light”, cement and glass cases, spaces conceived as springboards towards the void. It is this void that she tries to set in motion, conferring upon it a kind of temporality.

The exhibition Are You Experienced? at EACC will consist of various sensorial environments which the public will be able to experience for themselves. In this project, the artist proposes the creation of three installations playing simultaneously with the interior and exterior spaces of the art centre.

On the esplanade outside the EACC, she has created the Blue, Red and Yellow pavilion, a proposal consisting of a volume built with metal whose polycarbonate walls form cells covered by transparent films in blue, red and yellow. Inside there is a kind of dense coloured artificial mist that changes according to the position of the spectator and his or her proximity to each colour. Looking at mist is an experience that produces contrasting effects. It seems to abolish all obstacles, materiality, the resistances specific to a given context and, at once, to transmit a materiality and a tactility to light.

Inside EACC, Janssens creates two interventions designed specifically for the space: one based on sound and the other on light. Colours, visual light and sound effects, are the core constitutive elements of these proposals that appeal to the senses, inviting us to experience other forms of grasping the space and which, as the artist herself has said, the situations she creates are not reducible to (more or less spectacular) formal effects.

On the occasion of the exhibition it has been publiseh Experienced an artist’s book featuring all Ann Veronica Janssens’ photographic archives from 1986 to the present with their original classification.

With 500 pages and 6000 images, this publication is a complete overview of the artist’s work accompanied by a “conversed” text between Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François translated into ten languages (French, Dutch, English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese and Russian), plus a chronological index of her works and exhibitions and a bibliography.