Tower Room Exhibition

Ann Veronica Janssens’ solo exhibition at Ikon in 2002 conveyed the artist’s characteristic fascination with natural phenomena and everyday experience, through coloured light projection and installation work. Returning now, ten years later, she presents a video portrait of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer at the age of 102. Filmed in real time while he takes a break, we see him smoking, at once statuesque and nothing if not flesh and blood. In spite of its being absolutely uncontrived, it could not be more affecting, drawing us into speculation of what this man – a personification of modernism, whose buildings have shaped countless lives – could possibly be thinking. Here he strikes us as being all too human.