Ann Veronica Janssens' 'Grand Bal' conjures performative and sensorial experience

The permanency, synonymous with the built environment, for Ann Veronica Janssens, an artist from Belgium, is a salient feature open to experimentation and manipulation. With a successful career spanning close to four decades, if Janssens' artistic career could be cogitated as a whole unit to count, it has thrived on the intersection of art and science. The ongoing retrospective Grand Bal at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan explores the possibilities of human perception of the surroundings to gauge the visceral responses of the audience. Roberta Tenconi, chief curator of Pirelli HangarBicocca, has curated this art exhibition. Since the French title of the exhibition Grand Bal, which translates to Grand Ball in English, refers to the performative dimension of the project, it also engages with the natural elements of the earthly hours. The movement of the sun during the day, visible through the opening on the ceiling of the building and along the outer wall of the exhibition space, punctuates the rhythm of the aleatory choreography created by the visual artist. The call for participation across the installation works, architecture and viewers anchors the lyrical flow across the triad: to underline their relationship only to excavate the complexity of architectural narratives.

The minimalistic approach embraced by the contemporary artist to create installation works, spanning both “environmental” and “intimate” scales, evokes sensorial experience and performative attentiveness. Not limited to the in-situ static installation, the aural and video work as a part of the exhibition at Navate within Pirelli HangarBicocca and the outdoor area, is an effort to add an aura of surrealism around the built environment. To do it seamlessly, the artistic intervention in the shape of the Waves transmutes the exit doors into openings. The hardwood or shatterproof glass of the door is switched with a porous and transparent PVC net. It facilitates ushering in the outdoor elements such as a stream of natural light, the flow of aural reverberations, and the expanse of breeze to the exhibition space. The overpowering dynamics of the architectural space accentuate the dynamic experience of the exhibition. The tactile interaction with the space expands the nature of architecture beyond its apparent limits. Besides, through openings in the ceiling of the building sunbeams infiltrate through the space on the floor and the artworks, changing the perception of the space throughout the day.

With the simple use of light, glass and mirrors reflection, or ungraspable materials such as air or artificial fog, she completely alters the preconceived notions around belongings and materiality. To support this observation, Tenconi, in an interview with STIR, cites a few examples from the exhibition, "The site-specific intervention Drops, which consists of round mirrors arranged on the floor that by reflecting and revealing the over 20 meters height ceiling, expand the range of possible points of view. While, another site-specific installation Area consists of a walkable structure of thousands of concrete building blocks, unfixed, that extends over a large section of the Navate, forming an extension of the space, a space within a space. These works, as much as many others, challenge the architecture of Pirelli HangarBicocca, by playing with the very nature of this former industrial space.

The installation Drops at the entrance to the Navate consisting of the 12 round mirrors, settled on the floor of the Piazza. These “drop-like” fragments illuminate a myriad of representations of architectural structure. It manipulates the trained eye perspective of the site, troubling the visitor’s perception of the site and offering new visual perspectives on the surroundings. With this art installation Janssens gives a spin to one of her previous works Danaé, created in collaboration with Nord project and Co in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. The collection of mirrors placed on the ground in the work Danaé reflected ceiling frescoes painted by the Italian master ceiling frescoes Tintoretto. The installations realise the necessity to make, “an attempt to escape from the tyranny of objects,” to borrow Janssens’ words.

To defy the geometrical precision available with architectural structures, Janssens placed L'espace infini, a hollow rectangular structure devoid of corners or edges to acquaint the viewers with the space sans dimensions and borders. In a similar vein, the installation MUKHA, Anvers evokes a psychedelic effect. The cloud of dense artificial fog and natural light disturbs the distinguishing feature of the room. Janssens can change the public's perception of space through minimal forms and gestures that have an anti-monumental quality. Her artistic practice challenges scale and monumentality and humans’ common concept of objecthood. This is what she achieves with the whole exhibition in Pirelli HangarBicocca as well.

“Often based on experiments carried out in collaboration with scientists, the body of works becomes a site of the laboratory to draw empirical findings on the boundaries between properties and physical-material elements—largely considered to be a set of binary opposites such as light and darkness, sound and silence, emptiness and presence, the tangible and the incorporeal,” elucidates Tenconi. The works of Janssens call for the direct participation of viewers, inviting them to experience reality differently, to activate their dormant senses. In doing so the spatial-temporal categories by which we define the architecture extrapolates the sociopolitical and cultural aspects.

The exhibition Grand Bal runs at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until July 30, 2023.