Ann Veronica Janssens wraps Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca in mild, mist and magic

Ann Veronica Janssens has constructed a profession out of skinny air. Mist and light-weight are to the Brussels-based artist what stone and marble had been to Rodin: uncooked supplies to be sculpted and perfected. ‘I’ve tried to offer materiality to sure phenomena that, at first sight, could not appear to have any,’ she tells me over a Zoom name from Milan’s Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, a 15,000 sq m tyre factory-turned-art basis the place she’s putting in her largest present so far. Titled ‘Grand Bal’, the exhibition spans 4 a long time of experiments with the sensory and performative nature of area, together with an oblong concave sculpture evoking infinitude, site-specific brick constructions, dizzying optical glass items and her celebrated immersive fog set up. ‘It’s the primary time I’ll present these works collectively,’ she says. ‘It’s this alternate that pursuits me; it’s the exhibition’s true problem.’

Born in 1956, Janssens grew up within the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. There, with minimal education obligations, she spent her time observing modifications in mild, from the dry season’s gray scales to the wet season’s shimmering luminosity. ‘It was an expertise of motion in colors,’ she remembers, describing the depth and tempo of sunsets. ‘In my work, motion is in all places.’ These early encounters have infused her outlook ever since. However earlier than turning to the visible arts, Janssens needed to grow to be an architect, like her father. ‘I believed it might be a profession for me, however it turned out to be an amazing misunderstanding,’ she says of her stint finding out structure on the Beaux-Arts’ college in Brussels. ‘My sensitivity requires me to the touch the fabric and work with three-dimensional areas quite than flooring plans.’ She deserted her drafting desk and joined the close by college of La Cambre, the place she studied below the Belgian-Polish textile artist and sculptor Tapta. ‘There was way more freedom within the visible arts,’ says Janssens who taught on the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 2012-2022. 

However Janssens’ architectural sensibility has remained. It’s notably palpable in
her early works when she started utilizing bricks (generally wrapped in aluminium foil or tape, like on the 1994 São Paulo Biennial) to create ephemeral spatial extensions of current buildings. These ‘tremendous areas’, because the artist calls them, take the type of vernacular structure and even ruins. At Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, she revisited this strategy by putting in Space, a big walkable floor of concrete blocks, throughout the previous industrial plant, successfully creating an area inside an area. Above the platform, she has put in swings that change color on contact with human warmth, altering their look whereas leaving traces of gallery-goers’ presence. 

It wasn’t till the late Nineties that Janssens’ work took an explicitly immaterial flip. Her now-signature fog rooms first gained world consideration on the 1999 Venice Biennale when she represented Belgium alongside the artist Michel François. Since then, she has » continued to experiment with synthetic mist by creating large-scale immersive environments, generally utilizing vivid colored lights, by which an abstracted sense of time and distance is punctuated by different guests’ phantasmic silhouettes. Iterations of this work have since been proven the world over, generally upsetting stunning encounters. ‘Numerous love tales had been born within the mist,’ the artist says. ‘Fairly just a few {couples} had been shaped in them. Some have even written to inform me they obtained married!’

For Janssens, her early architectural interventions will not be so totally different from her immaterial experiments. ‘To start with, I labored with stable and customary supplies,’ she says. ‘However there’s continuity in notions of time and light-weight.’ This strategy is palpable in a brand new site-specific set up, titled Waves, at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca by which Janssens has opened 9 emergency exit doorways that she has coated with a unfastened, porous PVC cloth harking back to mosquito nets.

By doing so, the artist permits pure mild, sound and air to bleed into the exhibition area, altering its in any other case dim environment. These works provoke a type of ‘hypnotic moiré’, as she says. ‘It gives the look of seeing the air passing by means of.’

This concern with the materiality of time and light-weight has been conducive to multidisciplinary collaborations. Her first experimentation with colored fog, titled MA-I, resulted from a collaboration with choreographer Pierre Droulers (uncle of artist Laure Prouvost) and light-weight designer Jim Clayburgh, which befell on the Excursions dance competition in 2000. Since then, the artist has commonly labored with the internationally acclaimed Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, founding father of the Brussels-based up to date dance college and firm Rosas. ‘I believe that is the place my work is essentially the most invisible,’ Janssens says of the collaboration, which began in 2011. ‘We expect very equally about concepts of discount, formal simplicity and financial system.’