Exhibition Notes: Viviane Sassen

[Visited 17 January 2024]

Viviane Sassen is a Dutch art and fashion photographer who spent the first four years of her life in Kenya. The main body of works here are photos that explore her return to Kenya and another trip to the former Dutch colony in South America, Suriname (where Dutch is still the official language!). 

The photos are staged, performative photos, but in a low-key way with a no-fuss minimal aesthetic, almost awkward, not stereotypically sensual as such. But you get a clear sense that they are composed photos in a way that you feel like you are clearly being guided as to what look at. These are photos that are telling you what the photographer has seen in the image, what she wants you to see. That line of shadow — that highlight.

A young woman, in colourfully patterned yellow clothes stands on the edge of what looks like a grave dug in red orange dirt. With her back to us, her body curves to the right, a sinuous line from head to foot that directs us to look at a fancy (yellow?) shoe semi-buried in the dirt. But it’s her hair — intricate row work that fans out from a central part like a fern leaf, her head perfectly tilted so that it creates the geometry of the image. 

In another, a body in milky water — just arms out and head visible — a floating peaceful cruciform.

A mix of dark smooth skin and black fabric — two fingers embrace —but  it’s hard to tell where skin stops and fabric begins. 

Shadows,  divisions, diffusions, hiding and revealing.

We hear a poem about shadows as we watch dark-skinned hands signing, but in negative so that the white shadows make points of contact with silvery hands. The poem talks of being made into a diamond when dead, all the body’s carbon compressed into its ultimate and hardest form. 

In a multiscreen video work of sliding stills Sassen explores the decadence of Versailles: the broken sculptures, the cast metal prosthetic noses used to hide the syphilitic decay; close ups of marble scrotems. But she has added braids around things so that colours bleed and splatter. Then she introduces young girls from a neighbouring suburb to Versailles who have spectacular braids and ribbons. They frolic as a contemporary foil. A voice over by Tilda Swinton, in her Orlando voice, talks of decadence while the music is something and nothing. I realise how the sound of an installation can just be stuff.

On the top floor are her fashion works, in projections that spread across walls and floor, reflected in a mirrored back wall. Blocks of colour, minimalist, single bodies in relation to geometries. They show more of a tendency to grit rather than glamour and in her manner of posing and composing bodies the trajectory from fashion to art emerges.

PHOSPHOR : Art & Fashion 1990-2023
Maison Européen de la Photographie (MEP)
18/10/23 – 10/2/2024
https://www.mep-fr.org/event/viviane-sassen