Viviane Sassen

Fotografiska Shanghai is honored to present the first major retrospective exhibition in China of celebrated Dutch artist Viviane Sassen in China, PHOSPHOR：Art & Fashion 1990-2023, from June 8th 2024 to August 25th 2024.

The exhibition brings together for the first time Sassen’s most emblematic series, including 'Umbra', 'Lexicon' and 'Flamboya' as well as unseen archival material, mixed-media works, and incorporates photography, painting, collage, video, and editorial fashion production. The show is done in partnership with the MEP - Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, with exhibition partner JIL SANDER and with special support of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

“I was always hoping that those shadows function as a mirror so people could reflect on themselves and look upon their own preconceived ideas about the other.”

Viviane Sassen

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Introspective Journey（2004-2014）

The exhibition opens with introspective and intimate works produced in Kenya and South Africa between 2004 and 2014. Between the ages of two and five years old, Viviane Sassen lived in a Kenyan village where her father worked as a doctor in a hospital. Viviane Sassen describes this period as her “years of magical thinking”, and her mind is filled with memories of strong emotions and precise images from those early years: light, shadow, colours, people, and starry skies make up the souvenirs that permeate her photographic work. She returned to Kenya with her parents ten years later, as a teenager, and again in 2001 to make photographs. Back in the village where she had spent her early childhood, her memories merged with her imagination. From this combination emerged her series 'Flamboya', 'Parasomnia' and 'Umbra', which can be interpreted as an introspective journey. Sassen created highly personal images by combining her recollections of her life in Kenya with the reality of the territory. She used familiar stylistic tools – shadows, framing, colour, use of the body as a sculptural object – to juxtapose these different experiences. From these assemblages, Sassen manages to create troubling images in which different levels of readings coexist.

New Stories（2014-2020）

The exhibition continues with 'Venus & Mercury', created in 2020 for the exhibition Visible/Invisible at the Trianon estate where, for six months, Sassen was given access to the Château de Versailles outside of visiting hours and invited to explore the archives that document the history of the palace and its occupants. After completing this research, Sassen produced a series of photographs, collages and video installations that evoke the themes of eroticism, power, illness and death. Sassen was particularly inspired by the stories of the French court in the 17th and 18th centuries, which she brought into the present time by inviting a group of young women who had grown up near the palace to participate in her project. The title of the series was inspired by the saying “A night with Venus, a life with Mercury”, which alludes to the fact that at the time, mercury, a poisonous substance, was used to treat syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that swept through Versailles and its court. In the end, unsurprisingly, the mercury did even more damage than the illness itself.

Sassen and Surreaslism（2017-2022）

This section is Viviane Sassen's recent series combining paint, ink and collage. Mushrooms sprout on women’s bodies, hybrid beings cover the walls in a kind of anarchic dance, and fragments of objects and bodies merge with strange landscapes. Bringing together the series 'Of Mud and Lotus' 2017, 'Paint Studies' 2021, 'Consequences / Cadavre Exquis' 2020 and 'Modern Alchemy' 2022, presenting some of Viviane Sassen's most experimental works. Most of them are based on earlier photographs that have been transformed by the addition of paint or the use of collage. Since 2017, the artist has been combining human figures, animals and plant forms. These works are powerfully beautiful and seek to provoke an inner awakening, a new approach to our relationship with the world.

The Development of an Artistic Language（1990-2001）

Returning to her earliest works, this section offers visitors an opportunity to discover works that have never been shown, including objects from her personal archives (in particular her sketchbook from art school), her first self-portraits, her end of studies photographic project and her series 'Folio'. Together, these elements reveal the origins of Sassen's visual language: we can already detect her sculptural investigation of the body, her exploration of geometric shapes and fragments, her use of colour, her work with shadows and her use of paint. Despite its technical diversity, Sassen's body of work is extremely coherent, both in terms of the subjects depicted and her “visual lexicon.”

Fashion Photography and Experimentation（2001-2023）

The exhibition closes with experimental works from throughout Sassen's career. During her studies, Sassen remained close to the world of fashion, which she herself studied before turning to photography. She took pictures for fashion design students in Utrecht preparing their final-year projects and also worked with the artist and stylist Emmeline de Mooij, creating images for independent magazines such as Purple and Kutt. Over the years, her involvement with the fashion world intensified; she has collaborated on campaigns for countless prestigious companies including Dior, Carven, M-Missoni, Stella McCartney/Adidas, Louis Vuitton, Jacquemus and Dries Van Noten. Sassen is recognised and sought after for her unmistakable style, which stands in stark contrast to traditional fashion photography. Under her gaze, bodies and clothes are transformed into sculptural matter that she combines with flamboyant colours in unique shots that are often elaborately staged.

ABOUT ARTIST

Viviane Sassen (b. 1972) is a Dutch artist living in Amsterdam. Sassen lived in Kenya as a child and often works in Africa. She first studied fashion in Arnhem, but soon turned to photography and completed a master’s degree in fine art at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU), and Ateliers Arnhem. After her studies in 1992 at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU), Viviane Sassen devoted herself entirely to photography, both as an artist and a fashion photographer. This dual trajectory gave rise to a powerfully singular and eclectic visual oeuvre.

Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including In and Out Of Fashion, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam in 2012; Umbra, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam in 2014; Analemma: Fashion Photography 1992 -2012, The Photographers' Gallery, London in 2015; Pikin Slee, ICA, London in 2015; Umbra, Fotografiska, Stockholm in 2017; Lexicon, Foto Kunst Stadforum, Innsbruck, Austria in 2017; Umbra, Deichtorhallen, Hambourg in 2017; Umbra, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago 2017.

Sassen has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2011, No Fashion, Please! Photography between gender and lifestyle at Kunsthalle, Vienna in 2011; at the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, Germany in 2016; at the Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle in 2016; at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2017; at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 2017; at CAFA Museum, China in 2018; at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco in 2020 and at Fotomuseum, Winterthur in 2022.

Her work was featured in the main exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, in 2013.

Sassen was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York's Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. In 2015, she was awarded the David Octavius Hill Medal from the German Photography Academy and was also nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her exhibition Umbra. She has also received numerous awards for her publications.