Documentary projects

Saskia Janssen (b. 1968) lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 1996 and 1997. Janssen is represented by Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS and currently teaches at de Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. From January through December 2015 she is a resident artist at I.S.C.P., New York.

Saskia Janssen mixes a variety of media with an anthropological approach in her socially engaged site-specific works. She has collaborated with a.o. sailors, nightclub singers, hard drug users, Buddhists, psychiatric hospital patients and inmates. Often to make visible, or materialize situations that are invisible at first. The outcomes of these collaborations have taken the form of installations, recorded albums, drawings, performances and printed publications. Together with George Korsmit, in 2005 she established The Rainbow Soulclub, an art studio in an Amsterdam shelter for long-term drug users. Since then, they have run a weekly program in the studio, often together with their art students.