The German artist Anja Jensen (born 1966) works with photography and installation. Gallery f5.6 , in Munich proudly presents her first solo exhibition. Society’s wish for tighter security and thus the call for ever-closer surveillance is at the core of Anja Jensen’s work. By taking ready made surveillance images out of its usual context and planting them into contemporary art practice, the ambivalence between security and control is just one of the questions that the viewer is confronted with . Her early series of work results from the process of working directly with security companies. Jensen worked at her local airport in Mｕnster Osnabrｕck for three weeks as a normal employee. She used the monitors at the hand luggage security check as her medium, documenting luggage of passengers on their way from Mｕnster to Munich to Mallorca and Amsterdam.
Anja Jensen’s latest body of work continues in this vein, without using ready made surveillance images, instead choreographing her own scene entirely. The images, remiscent of film stills, seem over- artificial and somehow magical. The story they tell begins and ends completely in the viewer’s mind. A person or a group of people are undergoing a peculiar action in the middle of the night. As usual for surveillance cameras, Anja Jensen shoots the picture from an extreme bird’s eye perspective. A dense seach-light is shun directly onto the actors, illuminating them strongly and forcing them out of their hiding places. The resulting images seem overly dramatic, uncanny, almost absurd and lure the viewer into a different world. Important in her work is that the images are not digitally manipulated. As in Jeff Wall’s or Gregory Crewdson’s work it is not only the end result of the image but also the process that stands in the foreground.
Anja Jensen studied painting and photography at the Kunstakademie Mｕnster. She has received several art scholarships (Kunststiftung Landesbank Schleswig Holstein, Atelierstipendium Mｕnster, Gotlandstipendium). This year and 2005 she has been presented with her first solo Museum exhibition touring mainly Northern Germany. A fully illustrated catalogue will be available to accompany the show. Anja Jensen is an artist which one should keep a close eye in the future.
