ESCAPE TO SOLASTALGIA
Solo Exhibition iN New Taipei City Arts Center
Solo Exhibition iN New Taipei City Arts Center
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Karin Janssen's work is as fantastical as it is rich – as blooming with vitality as it is a stagnant reminder of a lingering death. It confronts us with the skulls of extinct dinosaurs towering over watercolour tapestries of wild and tropical plants, of hopeful dolphins and guilty hands, of birds and bees and backbones entwined and cast back against the unforgiving lines of urban skyscrapers. It is a world within worlds of contradiction.
Escape to Solastalgiais Janssen's second solo exhibition in Taiwan. Rooted in her interest in the psychology of climate change, this body of work explores the meaning of the word 'solastalgia': the troubling dichotomy of finding both comfort and suffering in the future of our ecosystems. It is defined by a feeling of duality which emerges and unravels itself in the particular grief one experiences in a world which, whilst momentarily still breathing, deteriorates all around us.
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Dolphins in Venice, 2020-21
Pen, gouache, watercolour, pencil on paper 183 x 135 cm At the beginning of the Corona virus pandemic there were lots of stories going around that the human lockdown was good news for nature: there were sightings of wild animals in big cities all over the world, and the sighting of dolphins and swans retaking the canals in Venice went viral. However, later these stories appeared to be fake and the dolphins were filmed off the coast in Sardinia, not Venice. People’s desperate desire to see some good coming out of the pandemic and the hope that nature is strong enough to recover, that no matter what we’ve done, nature is powerful enough to rise above it, appeared to be just that, hope and desire, but not true. In the work there are dinosaur skeletons again, hugely popular since Jurassic Park in the 90’s, and blurring the lines between what is real, what is fantasy and what is extinct. My worry is that by the popularity of dinosaurs we imbed our children and ourselves with an acceptance of animal species going extinct, only living on in picture books and as plastic toys. The swimmer on the right is trying to swim with the dolphins, but her hands are covered in a black oil like substance, as in blood covering the hands of the guilty. At the top we see parts of skyscrapers in this unsustainable circle of life, whilst the sun is going down on us at the bottom. The snake at the bottom gets blamed for expelling us all from paradise whilst now snakes are going extinct themselves, thanks to us. In the middle there is a spine, referring to my own struggles back then with severe back pain, yet at the same time the spine is visually trying to hold this mess together. |
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Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet, 2020-21
Pen, gouache, watercolour, pencil on paper 80 x 183 cm Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet is partly inspired on Samson’s biblical riddle, partly Sally Weintrobe’s theory on the psychological roots of the climate crisis, and my own personal struggle for balance between raw ambition on the right side and a more wholesome life on the left. It shows on the right side a dead lion in which bees made a hive. It supports the cogs of a neoliberal culture of greed, limitless ambition and uncare from which grows a poisonous oil leaking orchid, killing a baby sea turtle (there has been a huge oil spill in the south of Taiwan where I went snorkelling with amazing sea turtles, which I fear are now struggling if not dead). Propped up against that lion is a sleeping tiger. My son’s innocent play is threatening to wake the tiger from which grow the supporting vines holding up a home, thus potentially collapsing the whole dream. |
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K1 + U1 = K2 + U2, 2020-21
Pen, gouache, watercolour, ink, pencil, gold leaf on paper 183 x 113 cm When you are stuck in any kind of mental problem, the only person who can get you out, is you yourself. This work deals with this circle of energy, that the things you create are also the things that fill you up again. The heart in the middle is a sea urchin, spikey on the outside, soft and vulnerable on the inside. The swimmer put a golden ball (made with gold leaf) back into the heart. The seal at the bottom left is playing with a plastic octopus toy, which is of course totally wrong, and it fills me with dread to think that my son might not be ready to dive in time for him to enjoy the richness of coral reefs before they go extinct. “I had the thought that maybe when wild animals become extinct, they will simply carry on as existing in our imagination or as cuddly toys (like the dinosaurs)” ( Sally Weintrobe, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare) The title is an equation regarding the conservation of energy K1 = initial kinetic energy U1 = initial potential energy K2 = final kinetic energy U2 = final potential energy |
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Baobab core, 2020-21
Pen, gouache, watercolour, pencil, gold leaf on paper 183 x 113 cm In this work we see a woman trying to become one with nature, and succeeding. Years ago I made a few drawings called “trying to become one with nature and failing”, but now she is succeeding, perhaps because she, like nature, is embracing the limitations of her strength. The woman is becoming one with a sort of baobab tree (I loved seeing them in Senegal and how they were used as landmarks: “turn right at the baobab” or “the bus stop is at the baobab”), she is sitting up confidently posing, her legs turning into a cheetah (as my four year old son became obsessed with cheetahs, certain cheetah species in India went extinct). There is a hole inside her, but it is closing up. Her pain is turning into power, she is learning from having fallen and from the sap of the tree a sort of tiny super spider woman emerges. Life is growing from her, although the sleeping snake is also there, ready to mess things up again. The work has become a combination of weakness turning into strength, which is then again potentially undermined. |
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A.C.T. or Pig headed clear minded bulldog with boobs, 2021
Gouache, watercolour, ink on paper 117 x 80 cm A.C.T stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy but it has the nice double meaning of also encouraging to act. The tentacles are the useless thoughts that cloud one’s mind, trying to distract this woman who is trying to rescue a small baby turtle from pollution. Her hands are covered in red blood, showing that even though she is guilty and imperfect, she can still aim to think clearly and perform a positive act. That is what the climate crisis needs: we need imperfect warriors. |
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Broken chain, 2020
Pen, gouache, watercolour, acrylic, pencil on paper 80 x 184 cm Broken Chain was made during my period of intense eco grief which followed my involvement with climate change activism. The female figure on the left is contemplating death by holding a skull on her head, whilst the tentacles of her thought push her newborn baby up. It deals with my fears as a new mother and the desire to catapult my young child out of this mess into a better future. The broken chain refers to the break I hope there will remain between us and extinct animals like dinosaurs. An emu looks up disturbed and slightly sternly accusing to the viewer, as if to hold them accountable. |
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Lacuna, 2019
Pen, gouache, watercolour, pencil on paper 79 x 111 cm Lacuna literally means “an unfilled space; a gap”. This work deals with my period of eco grief which followed my involvement with climate change activism. The iceberg theory from Virginia Satir utilizes the metaphor of an iceberg to represent human experiencing, so at the top there is your behaviour, and underneath that there are feelings, feelings about feelings, expectations, yearnings and at the bottom the self. Swimming down into the layers of the psyche and the body became a recurring theme around that period. The polar bear in this work swims down into a microscopic view of the human stomach wall, below which are some - soft on the inside but spikey and poisonous on the outside - sea urchins of buried trauma and other strange yet beautiful growths. |
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Bigger on the inside, 2019
Gouache, watercolour, acrylic on paper 183 x 140 cm⠀ This mixed media work on paper deals with notions of escapism into nature, climate change denial and eco grief. The work uses decalcomania, a technique often used by Max Ernst in the early 1900’s, providing an accidental starting point on which I can react instinctively, using gouache, watercolour, and ink. The resulting work is a fictitious coral, inspired on corals seen off the coast of Taiwan where I often go snorkelling. The coral has elements which resemble parts of the human body, celebrating nature and how intertwined human life is with it. As the coral reefs are dying and our planet is overheating, in the corner of the reef is a woman simultaneously becoming a part of this world and is hiding from it all, in climate change denial or eco depression. The title of the work is borrowed from the British television series Dr Who, where the “tardis” is a magical time traveling police phone box, which can travel through space and time to save the world and many other planets, and it’s much “bigger on the inside”. With the title I refer to the fact that although coral reefs only take up less than 1% of the ocean floors, they support over 25% of all marine life and half a billion people’s lives are dependent on coral ecosystems. The title also reflects the hope that somehow we can turn back time and still save planet earth.⠀⠀ |
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Extraordinary machine, 2014 - 2015
Gouache, watercolour, pencil and ink on paper 180 x 400 cm The woman in this work is a self-portrait combined with Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl, a prophetic priestess in the Sistine Chapel. As Michelangelo only used male models, she has a very muscular body and by using this male power she turns into a trans powerhouse. I made this work as I was moving from London to Shanghai, whilst I was actually longing to escape to nature and not to a big city. The cat in the bottom left is a way of me focussing all my fears into the image of my cat freezing to death during the journey. Shanghai is still pencilled in, as I didn’t know what it was going to be like, but she is holding the reigns of ambition in her left hand, also symbolized by the green claw. The snake around her waist might betray her. In her right hand she holds a human embryo at its earliest stage, whilst she is weighing up motherhood versus ambition. The butterflies and exposed human heart symbolise her recent wedding. The quetzal bird leading the way is her desire to live in the jungle in Costa Rica. The tiger coming from underneath her skirt roars powerfully into the future she is heading, its roar drowning out her fears. Extraordinary Machine talks about how sometimes being in certain challenging situations requires you to be an extraordinary machine: a person who in chaotic circumstances has to be powerful and in her calm steadiness resembles partly a human being and partly a machine. |
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Holobiont, 2020
Gouache, watercolour, ink on paper 110 x 79 cm This work I started right before the pandemic, it was originally called Corona Queen, when I had the frustrating experience of on one hand trying to warn friends and family in Europe that the virus was going to spread to them and on the other how extremely limited the amount of control I have over anything. Then I learned about symbiosis through Lynn Margulis (Symbiotic Earth), that symbiosis is the key driver of evolution, that humans are 90% not human by cell, and that for every one of our human genes our body contains 200 microbial genes, so we are complex ecosystems ourselves. This, together with Margulis’ and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that the whole earth is one big ecosystem, brings up the question where a human starts and ends. The fact that the virus jumped from animals to humans because we cut down their natural habitat lead to the title Holobiont, meaning an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, kind of a teɑm, e.g. ɑ humɑn. |
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TV interview with Home+, part 1/2
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TV interview with Home+, part 2/2
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