Ann Veronica Janssens, Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht, Installation view, Courtsey Esther Schipper, Berlin
The site-specific installation Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht ( I talk to you like children are talking at night) by Ann Veronica Janssens, which I visited in November at the gallery Esther Schipper in Berlin, gave me the possibility of feeling like an entity defined by pure perception. It was an invitation to let go, to dissolve in the light.
The work is presented as a room, closed by a transparent plexiglass wall, through which the colored light can be seen changing from green to pink to yellow. On the transparent wall a door allows to go inside.
When you open the door to enter a thinly colored fog is obscuring any possibility of perception of the space in front of you. The first impression of occlusion is stressed by the impossibility of seeing.
The fog is a wall that despite the ethereal consistency. It is ready to swallow and absorb the visitor by wrapping it completely. The feeling of dizziness get stronger by the loss of spatial and temporal coordinates. All of this can be both extremely pleasant and tremendous.
It reminded me of the first time I found myself in the middle of a snowstorm in Svalbard. The air becomes dense and gray to the point that you can not see and recognize anything. I felt the terrible sensatiodn of being vulnerable and alone. When you do not see what you are facing the only thing you can do is stand still and wait for it to pass.
Within the installation Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht, I tried to get used to the uneasy condition of not knowing what was happening to me.
I tried to relax and feel the tranquility of those colors materialize. I breathed slowly and deeply. But nothing. On the contrary, I felt a grip tighten in my stomach and the feeling that the fog was choking me. There was only one thought in my mind: Elda, find a way out!
Ann Veronica Janssens (1956, Folkestone, England - lives and works in Brussels, Belgium) works precisely with light. Her work is a continuous, interminable experimentation.
Her research is focused, through the use of different media, to our perception, not as a purely mental act, but as a sensual process that moves through our body.
In the exhibition Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht the physicality of the installation of Janssens is a challenge to go beyond the limits of the conceptual, visual and sensorial parameters of perception of reality. In an interview the artist says she is interested in dazzling situations.
In her work our body itself is immersed in light and at the same time is able to create this light 'mentally'. In fact, the light is captured by our gaze and persists in our mind. For example, if we look at a light source for some time and then we close our eyes, we continue to see this pulsating psychedelic light of different colors in our head.
Starting from these studies, related to visual possibilities and perceptive abilities, Ann Veronica Janssens' research insists on the mental image and the effect of light on us. Her installations involve the use of natural light, as in the experiment of the retention of light with sight, and also with the production of artificial light.
Installations often create the possible conditions of the view itself: a sort of optical experiment. The projector is the point of view, the projected light is the object. The observer finds himself in this situation as an alien element which belongs and do not belongs at the same time.
Janssens' works question the way in which our sensory capacities capture reality and modify mental images, thoughts and feelings and emotions related to it.
At this point I ask myself the emotions exist without us? Is it possible that the world, out of our perceptual grid, was made only of strong and colored emotions that hover like a thin mist? Is it possible for us to let ourselves go to these emotions out of this perceptual grid? Can we exist even without it?
To give materiality to light and color, Ann Veronica Janssens uses fog and steam as an element. This element give a certain volume to the forms, but it is ungraspable, like a ghost, a simulacrum. Walking in the colored fog, the observer also becomes a shadow.
In Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht, and in the series of installations with fog, Janssens insists on the category of space and on how much we can push the limits of our perception.
And I still wonder, how long do we take to get lost in the fog? how long do the limits of the room, our mental boundaries, dissolve?
Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht are words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke written in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé.
The fog this place without space, where every border recedes, that confuses you and makes you lose the orientation, the sense of space and time, can be assimilated in a certain sense to love or even better, as for Rilke, to the discovery other.
In his perpetual wandering Rilke found his landing point, absolute security in Lou. She was always.
Ann Veronica Janssens, Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht, Installation view, Courtsey Esther Schipper, Berlin
