Felicity (n.): a state of intense happiness, bliss.

KARIN JANSSEN Escape to Solastalgia

‘​Karin Janssen’s work is as fantastical as it is rich – as blooming with vitality as it is a stagnant reminder of a lingering death. It confronts us with the skulls of extinct dinosaurs towering over watercolour tapestries of wild and tropical plants, of hopeful dolphins and guilty hands, of birds and bees and backbones entwined and cast back against the unforgiving lines of urban skyscrapers. It is a world within worlds of contradiction.

Escape to Solastalgia is Janssen’s second solo exhibition in Taiwan. Rooted in her interest in the psychology of climate change, this body of work explores the meaning of the word ‘solastalgia’: the troubling dichotomy of finding both comfort and suffering in the future of our ecosystems. It is defined by a feeling of duality which emerges and unravels itself in the particular grief one experiences in a world which, whilst momentarily still breathing, deteriorates all around us.’ (September 2021)