Janus

Janus is a double-headed publication that can be read from both sides. It is based on a site-specific performance developed by Katrin Hornek and Karin Pauer in and for the main exhibition hall of Belvedere 21, which was the Austrian Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Expo that promoted the "peaceful use of nuclear power".
 
Approaching from one side, the reader encounters Helen, a fact-based fictional character who travels from the Brussels World’s Fair to the present, shaped by the voices, perspectives, and lived experiences that have defined the Atomic Age. The other side introduces Jane, a speculative archetype of a body adapted to survive in toxic, post-industrial landscapes. Navigating, absorbing, and resisting contamination across past, present, and future, Jane draws on Shannon Cram’s research on the nuclear body. Both meet in the middle, like the two faces of Janus, exposing the contradictions of the Atomic Age caught between promises of progress and the threat of annihilation.


Karin Pauer, performer and choreographer
Katrin Hornek, artist, teacher, Department of Site-Specific Art, University of Applied Arts Vienna