Preface
Dirk Snauwaert
(p. 5-6)
This publication derives from Ann Veronica Janssens' solo exhibition at
WIELS, entitled
Serendipity, constructed around a set of works outlining her
artistic research over the last few decades, hence recent projects and those
still in the laboratory phase. As is often the case with Ann Veronica Janssens,
the work evaporates or almost entirely physically disappears after its presentation,
and only the experiences, the memory of it and its documentation
remain to reconstruct or reconfigure the chapters that punctuate the
precise and consistent path traced by Ann Veronica Janssens through her
work over the past thirty years.
This book thus attempts to account for these phenomena, beginning
with photographic documentation of the
Serendipity exhibition in the specific
spatial context of the premises at WIELS. The architecture, the exhibition
route and the installations were constructed by the artist in close
dialogue with Charles Gohy, exhibition curator, who has supplemented
these with written records of each of the exhibited works, found here alongside
a photographic documentation.
To comment on this exhibition preview, it's entirely appropriate that an
invitation be extended to
Mieke Bal, one of the artist's main critics, so that
a new chapter be written and the new exhibition proposal be put into perspective
with those that preceded it, certain of which were also the subject
of reviews or critical essays from the same hand. The text here is based on
what was said at her talk during the
Serendipity exhibition. As such it articulates
and expands upon her theses on the concepts, the realisations and
their effects, as well as their evolution since 1999. Idiosyncratically, Bal was
indeed invited to publish a first draft in 1999, Light in Life's Lab, appearing
in the book-catalogue
Ann Veronica Janssens: Une image différente dans
chaque oeil / A Different Image in Each Eye on the occasion of the double
presentation
Horror Vacui in the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. A
presentation that defined the beginning of Janssens' international visibility.
This first engagement was succeeded by an invitation to publish her text in
German for
Lichtspiel, a publication appearing in the context of her exhibitions
at Kunstverein Munich and for DAAD at the Neue Nationalgalerie
Berlin in 2001, which marked a new phase regarding her visibility. The author
took advantage of this invitation to add fresh reflections about Janssens'
work. The text: 'Serendipity: The miracle of being where you are' constitutes
her third and most recent reflection. The outstanding quality of this text and the author's particular vision, which enables other interpretations and
broader perspectives, beyond history or the current state of contemporary
art, cannot be accentuated enough.
Ann Veronica Janssens occupies a specific place in the art of recent
decades, resulting from her significant research into light and auditory phenomena,
and the multiple manifestations of their realisation, avoiding all
symbolism or emphasis, and often taking the risk of placing the viewer in
situations of loss — contrary to the detachment, distanced and objectifying
perception, the austere position eternally associated with that of rational
modernism. In Janssens' work one oscillates between conceptualising sensations,
thoughtful but also immersive — trying to learn what happens to
the senses and the body during an act of immersion, loss of self, pure sensation,
without any distance; an effect resulting from an understanding of
ideas about the world and it's multiple manifestations.
And so she does nothing other than pursue the route set by the radical
and rigorous avant-garde, as per one Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who in the
1930s posited that the artist of the future should first be an engineer, conducting
his experiments and projects processed by immaterial radio wave
transmissions, and transposing his plans using the latest technology of his
time, rather than imagining reflections and composing the symbolic and
the tasteful. It is in keeping with this that we must view the continuation
of Ann Veronica Janssens' experimentation with technologies and sophisticated,
experimental materials, with which she primarily seeks to shape
experiences and unknown sensations up until the time of having had the
experience; that is to say, outside the vigorously symbolic, those that one
only encounters in the phenomena of science and whose derivatives are
found in the technologies that inform their practical application. With her
practicable, manageable applications, Janssens again offers a sphere of
reflection and introduces potentialities other than the utilitarian and pragmatic,
allowing for the discovery of a spiritual and experimental facet. This
tome constitutes both a testimony and a new landmark in her journey.
