ann veronica janssens brings light and fog to hermès ginza

ANN VERONICA JANSSENS BRINGS PERCEPTION TO GINZA

For her first solo exhibition in Japan, Ann Veronica Janssens is taking over Le Forum at Ginza Maison Hermès in Tokyo with things that are notoriously difficult to hang on a wall: light, air, time and perception itself. Titled 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo after the building’s own address, the exhibition opens on September 11, 2026, and brings together more than ten works conceived around the physical conditions of the space, alongside pieces from the artist’s ongoing practice since the 1990s.

Born in Folkestone in 1956 and based in Brussels, Janssens has spent decades testing how little an artwork might need in order to completely reorganize a room. After initially working with materials including plywood, glass and concrete, she increasingly turned toward light, sound and artificial fog around the beginning of the 1990s. Rather than filling architecture with objects, her installations tend to loosen its edges, using reflection, transparency and shifting atmospheric conditions to make space feel considerably less dependable than it did five minutes earlier.

Donut, 2003 | image: Florian Hölzherr, courtesy of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

LIGHT, GLITTER AND A SWING THAT REMEMBERS YOUR TOUCH

Among the works presented in Tokyo is Rose (2007), an installation in which seven spotlights cut through suspended particles, turning dispersed light into something that appears almost solid. Janssens repeatedly works in this uneasy zone between matter and immateriality, where a beam can behave like sculpture and an apparently empty room suddenly acquires thickness. In Untitled (blue glitter), open sculpture #1 (2015–2026), blue micro-glitter spreads across the floor, catching changing light and registering the fleeting effects of movement, viewpoint and time.

The body gets an even more direct role in Swings (2000–2023). Made from rope and wood, the suspended seats are covered with heat-sensitive film that changes through contact, allowing a visitor’s touch to briefly alter the work. Janssens has long resisted the idea of the viewer as a politely stationary observer: movement, interaction and the presence of other bodies become part of what is being exhibited. Here, looking is not quite enough — perception has to get up and move around.

Swings, 2002-2023 | image: Andrea Rossetti, courtesy of Pirelli Hangar Bicocca

AN INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE TAKES OVER LE FORUM

Elsewhere, works including Donut extend the exhibition into projected light, duration and the less tangible materials that have defined Janssens’ practice. Taken together, the installations manipulate light, air and circulation to produce what the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès describes as a kind of invisible architecture: spaces generated not through walls and ceilings, but through changes in atmosphere and sensation. The title’s insistence on a precise street address makes that strategy particularly pointed, anchoring an exhibition dedicated to unstable perception to one very fixed point on the map.

Janssens’ experiments have often intersected with research into the relationship between space, time, the body and the brain, including through the Brain Space Laboratory, which she co-founded with Nathalie Ergino in 2009. At Ginza Maison Hermès, however, the experiment does not require much explanation. Glitter shifts, light gains volume, surfaces react and architecture becomes unexpectedly porous. 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo runs at Le Forum on the eighth and ninth floors of Ginza Maison Hermès through January 11, 2027, with free admission.

IPE 650, 2009-2017 | image: Peter Cox, courtesy of De Pont Museum Tilburg