11 May 2010

Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes: Brain Space Laboratory & Ann Veronica Janssens

Initiated by IAC director Nathalie Ergino and Ann Veronica Janssens, the Brain Space Laboratory aims to use artistic experiments to look into the practical and theoretical links between space and the brain. This interdisciplinary laboratory brings together the ideas and experimental work of artists and scientists – physicists, neuroscientists, anthropologists – as well as of art theorists and historians.

The laboratory's inaugural study day on 18 June 2009 was devoted to phenomenology-inflected experimentation in the arts over the last fifty years. The second, on 21 January 2010, focused on issues in astrophysical research and notions of spatialisation in general.

Scheduled for 18 June 2010, the third session, «Towards Modified States of Consciousness», will delve into trance and hypnosis and their possible connections with certain forms of creative activity.
laboratoireespacecerveau.i-ac.eu


Focus on Ann Veronica Janssens
Ann Veronica Janssens brings an economy of means to dematerialisation of the work of art via the use of light.
Her installations invite the viewer into a sensory experience involving a mental and physical immersion. In the course of the last fifteen years her experimental ventures have included artificial mists – initially white (MUKHA, 1997), then coloured: Festival de Danse, Tours and MAC Marseille, 2000–2001; Neue Nationale Galerie Berlin, 2001; Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2005, etc – which challenge our habits of perception and orientation.


Ann Veronica Janssens : current events in France :
« En mai fais ce qu'il te plaît », 6 May–19 September 2010
Group sculpture exhibition at the Musée Bourdelle, Paris. www.bourdelle.paris.fr

« May », 8 May–19 June 2010.
The artist's second solo exhibition at the Air de Paris gallery. www.airdeparis.com

« A l'ombre d'un doute », 8 May–29 August 2010. Lorraine Region Contemporary Art Collection. Works from the collection, including MUHKA, the first Ann Veronica Janssens piece to plunge the visitor into an artificial mist (1997). www.fraclorraine.org

« Les Elixirs de Panacée », 13 May–17 October 2010. Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp. Contemporary artists probe the secrets of alchemy. www.benedictine.fr

Poster for European Museums Night 2010: Poster based on the work Side (studio version) (2006), a montage of images created during the total eclipse of the sun in 2006, in the town of Side, in Turkey.