Studium Generale Saskia Janssen
Saskia Janssen will give a lecture on the different worlds she inhibits in order to create her work. Before she started her studies she joined a circus and travelled around with them for a year. She creates art from her interest and curiosity towards hidden groups of people in today’s society. She doesn’t just make works about them, but also works with them or offers them a piece especially made for them. She worked with hard drug users in the Amsterdam based space Blaka Watra, with sailors a board of a containership and with nightclub singers in China. In 2013 she lived on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital in Den Dolder for three months and she visited shamans on a mountain in South Korea. Since 2010, she pays weekly visits to the Buddhist temple in Amsterdam, located in a basement underneath a tanning salon. The works that derive from this method find different forms: photos, drawings, installations and objects, texts and publications. The lecture will be quite informal and will be more of an interactive conversation between her and students.