Ayşe Erkmen and Ann Veronica Janssens: A

In 2013, the City of Ghent invited Ayşe Erkmen and Ann Veronica Janssens to each create a permanent sculpture for the Korenmarkt. From early in 2016 these two projects will share this open market square in the historical centre of the city. S.M.A.K. considers this as an opportunity to invite the two artists to the museum and, in a double exhibition, explore where their oeuvres meet.

Ayşe Erkmen and Ann Veronica Janssens are sculptors of approximately the same generation. For both of them, sculpture goes beyond the three-dimensional nature of the artwork and the spatial relationship between the object and the viewer. Their work is founded on a shared fascination for the hidden world of ordinary things. The angle from which they approach their material is different, however. Ayşe Erkmen is known for her innovative situational interventions, mostly in architectural spaces. Her projects result from an analysis of the immediate surroundings, with all the physical, practical, historical, cultural, political and philosophical significance they contain. Ann Veronica Janssens owes her reputation to the artistic research she carries out into the peculiarities of human perception. Her work is based on scientific experiments that involve such intangible phenomena as light, colour and sound. The work of both artists embraces everyday facts and phenomena in an astute way, looking clear-cut, light and ultimately beautiful.

Under the open, infinitely interpretable and somewhat absurd title—A—Ann Veronica Janssens and Ayşe Erkmen present new and existing work at S.M.A.K. in a display that is akin to the relationship between the public sculptures on the Korenmarkt. At the same time they make the museum into an important fellow player. By minimal sculptural interventions, they seek to make a maximum impact on its architecture and institutional task. Where the artists set up a physical or mental barrier for the viewer in the space, they have one major aim in mind: to undermine routine thought or behaviour so as to make the invisible visible, thus enabling a new view of the multiple surroundings and layers of meaning.

The exhibition is accompanied by two books on both artists, published in association with MER. Paper Kunsthalle, with an introduction by Ann Hoste and essays by Guillaume Désanges and Jan Verwoert, as well as letters to both artists from Philippe Van Cauteren.

For additional information, please contact Annelies Vantyghem: annelies@smak.be / T +32 (0)9 240 76 49