#2: INTRODUCTION TO VIVIANE SASSEN'S AFRICAN EXPERIENCE

This first room here is the work that I've made over the years in Africa. And most of the work that you see here I made in the early 2000s. I shot a lot of images in East Africa, also West and South, but mainly East Africa. I lived in Kenya when I was young, as a little girl. My father worked at a local hospital as a doctor. And my brothers were born in Kenya.

So back in the 1990s or early 2000s, the image of Africa in mainstream media was kind of limited. And I felt something was missing. Or at least there was something that I felt very deeply from my own experiences as a child that I was missing whenever I saw photographs about Africa. It would often be like documentary shots or images of hunger or famine, grainy black and white pictures.Or it would be beautiful nature pictures, more like National Geographic kind of style.

And I felt something in that image was lacking. And so when I went back to my village and suddenly I had these very vivid dreams at night. And I had these ideas for pictures coming into my head. And I started exploring the possibilities of staging my pictures. And getting a different layer of poetry into the work.