A disorientating mist forms Wellcome Collection’s new installation

Ann Veronica Janssens’ yellowbluepink sees an entire gallery at Wellcome Collection enveloped in mist of those very colours. Led through double doors that prevent the expansive fog from escaping, Janssens’ audience are quickly lost amongst seemingly solid walls of sunset fades and confused hands, mimicking mimes in boxes as they search for the true limits of the gallery walls. It’s disorientating, and as someone cheerily identified as we walked right into each other through the mist, not unlike how you might imagine the “tunnel of light” that approaches before death. But more than anything, it’s a calm space that refreshingly doesn’t translate well through smartphone photography, meaning that rather than focussing on mediation, participants can just be present.

The exhibition design and printed matter by Studio Hato continues the installation themes and colour-ways through thin, semi-transparent papers with French folds and reds, oranges and yellows that bleed through onto the text. Exhibited as the opening to Wellcome Collection’s programme States of Mind , which investigates human consciousness and what we are yet to understand of it, Ann Veronica Janssens’ yellowbluepink challenges our senses, perceptions and ability to surrender to experience over logic.