Ann Veronica Janssens: 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo

The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès is pleased to present 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo, the first solo exhibition in Japan of Ann Veronica Janssens (b. 1956, Folkestone, UK). She is a Brussels-based Belgian artist who is active in the international art scene. Since the late 1970s, Janssens has consistently pursued experimental endeavours, employing simple materials like plywood, glass, and concrete, and since around 1990s, also incorporating elements such as light, sound, and artificial haze. Her work spans a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, video, photography, and stage design for contemporary dance performances.

While sharing common interests with artistic movements such as Minimalism, which uses industrial materials and questions the inherent nature of the exhibition space, as well as Light and Space, which offers a scientific examination of perceptual phenomena such as light, volume, and scale, Janssens’ work manifests in the form of subtle, understated interventions. Her explorations consistently serve to stimulate our physical perceptions of the world, and the precarious and ambiguous realms of cognition within it.

Her work also extends to interdisciplinary dialogue, including the establishment of the “Brain Space Laboratory” (co-founded with Nathalie Ergino in 2009), a research platform that creates a bridge between artistic experimentation and scientific study, exploring how the brain perceives, navigates, and reacts to spatial and physical phenomena.

The exhibition consists of a series of works by Janssens that reflects upon her artistic career, particularly focusing on her activities since the 1990s. The decision to use the address of Hermès Maison Ginza Le Forum as the title of the exhibition strongly demonstrates Janssens’ physical, sensory, and semiotic (or conceptual) approach to the site. The series of works, addressed to a specific location and conceived through physical observations of the site, comprises over ten pieces, including Rose, which treats diffused light as a material; Untitled (blue glitter), which captures the traces of a fleeting moment; Swings, with a seat covered in heat-sensitive film; and Donut, a new work that employs the artist’s own voice as a medium. Such works challenge the inherent nature of the space, manipulating time, light and atmosphere, creating openings and generating air currents, ultimately producing invisible architecture that could be described as undefined zones of physical instability and perceptual disorientation where the boundaries between these elements are dissolved and obscured.

Janssens, in describing her approach, states that she seeks to find her work “amidst the loss of control, the absence of authoritarian materiality, and the attempt to escape the tyranny of objects”. Along with the transcendent sensations radiating from these works—which, amidst their refined intricacies, exude lustre, lightness, transparency, and fluidity—we experience the illusion of ourselves diffusing and permeating into the space. 

The Fondation d'entreprise Hermès presented Ann Veronica Janssens’s work at La Verrière in Brussels in 2015. At the same time, as part of the Artist's residencies programme, she was the mentor to three artists invited to work at the Hermès workshops between 2014 and 2016. *Pascal Rousseau, "Light Games", art press, no.299, February 2004

Ann Veronica Janssens
Born in 1956 in Folkestone, UK. Janssens lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Since the late 1970s, she has focused her work on the visitor’s experience. Her practice gives rise to intangible works. Her site-specific installations, which engage reflection, luminosity, and transparency, are created using elusive elements such as light, artificial haze, sound, and simple materials which function only as means or supports through which visitors may experience the fleeting nature of the lived moment, the subjectivity of spatial and temporal perception, and their continual transformation. This transformation of the material through the immaterial produces a loss of bearings and a sense of instability that shifts from the physical to the psychological. Visitors become active participants in a unique experience through their movements, their interactions, and their perception of the situations devised by the artist, and through these situations, of the architecture and spaces she activates.