Béla Pablo Janssen. ANARCHIVE
IM FOYER
24.6. – 17.9.2023

IM FOYER
Béla Pablo Janssen: ANARCHIVE
24 June – 17 September 2023 | Opening: 23 June 2023

In 2013, Béla Pablo Janssen began collecting and modifying posters from the streets. The posters mainly came from the context of art, such as exhibition advertisements. This led to the creation of ANARCHIVE, which has now grown to 103 cataloged and modified posters from the period between 2013 and 2023.

Janssen modified the posters in a uniform manner: the text was erased with colored, white, or black spray paint that matched the original color of the text, resulting in clouds or bars on each poster where information on the exhibition was previously legible. The works were titled with consecutive numbers and the title and location of the exhibition. This information is essential, since the main content that the posters previously included is not visible to viewers. In the overpainting with spray paint, often in a matching color, a new combination of background and erased text emerges, thus emphasizing the subject, with the overpainting as a painterly gesture.

Posters were collected for ANARCHIVE for over ten years and were not immediately painted over. With the absence of exhibitions and public events starting in spring 2020, this archive has become more valuable than ever, since it recalls a time before the pandemic, to which the cultural sector desperately sought to return.

ANARCHIVE will be shown for the first time in the exhibition series IM FOYER at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. A publication with the same title will be released by SORRY PRESS.

Béla Pablo Janssen (*1981 in Cologne) studied at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, the Berlin University of the Arts, and the Braunschweig University of Art. He lives and works in Cologne.

Béla Pablo Janssen: ANARCHIVE is the sixth project in the series IM FOYER at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, which began in October 2019.