Staging the Concert

Since the early 1990s, the Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens has been exploring the possibilities of light, colour and sound. Until now, she has done that with sensational exhibitions in Belgium and abroad.

Now, her play with space and our senses is moving into the concert hall. With HERMESensemble, she will present a sensory concert experience: a new edition of Staging the Concert! Janssens’ captivating installation distances itself from time, aligning with the tones of Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston — a four-and-a-half-hour meditative work for flute, piano and percussion. Settle into this slow movement of colour, in which you come and go as you please.

In parallel, BOZAR’s surrounding spaces will be tinted by Beyond the Event Horizon, an architecture sonore by Mireille Capelle, inspired by the creations of Ann Veronica Janssens and Morton Feldman. It offers a fluid and impalpable immersive sensory experience, inviting you on a meditative journey towards the performance in the Henry Le Bœuf Hall.

Beyond the Event Horizon – an Architecture Sonore

If I had to translate Morton Feldman’s sound creation For Philip Guston into an image, I would see a canvas covered in very light blues, pale greys, sometimes drifting toward darker backgrounds—yet in a texture so diluted with water that it becomes difficult to tell whether it
is truly darker or simply shadow. In the music, a dominant Gsharp. These colours disperse into a thousand variations across a time that seems to stretch into infinity.

Beyond the Event Horizon uses the same colours, but on a surface somewhere between glass and mirror. Strongly influenced by Ann Veronica Janssens’ work Ostende, I use the reflections of Feldman’s sounds as material. As spectators, we enter these sounds, we become part of them, we bathe in them, before stepping into the large hall to discover the precious moment of the performance created by
Ann Veronica Janssens and Morton Feldman with HERMESensemble.

-Mireille Capelle