Viviane Sassen grew up in Kenya, where her father practised as a doctor. Her
earliest memories of her youth stretch back to this time. She remembers the
beauty of the landscape and the children with whom she used to play. She also
recollects the poverty of the shanty towns and her father's terminally ill
patients. Sassen first revisited Africa in 2002. Since then, the continent has
formed the subject of her photography, as reflected in the series ‘Flamboya’,
in her ‘Ultra Violet’ sketchbook and the ‘Ultra Violet’ series which won her
the Prix de Rome in 2007. According to the judges for this prestigious prize,
her work is no pseudo-anthropology. ‘Sassen knows how to go beyond the
confines of her subject. The photographs do not just portray death, loss and
urban life in Africa. They show genuine humanity, cultural clichés, Sassen's
personal life story and aesthetics.’
Flamboya
'Flamboya' refers to the ‘Flamboyant’ tree which
blossoms in December and that scatters countless deep red-and-orange flowers
all over the landscape across East and South Africa. Yet, maybe this name
constitutes the sole remaining concession and reference to an exotic image of
Africa in the history of a body of work that otherwise helps to challenge this
enduring conception. Shot in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, the
'Flamboya' photographs stand as paradigmatic for Sassen’s new way of looking
at Africa; devoid of sentimentality, through poetical metaphors this vision
acknowledges the challenges and drawbacks of its complex reality.
Her working method is intuitive. Sassen lets herself taken by the appearance
or behaviour of people she encounters. Conversations follow and she endeavours
to win their confidence by drawing. The camera comes into play at the very
last. The final images - some staged, some spontaneous - are realised in
collaboration with 'the model', always receives a print of the image
afterwards. Although most of Sassen’s 'Flamboya' photographs are portraits,
none of them allows the viewer to easily distinguish the facial features of
most of her models. Their personal identity is symbolically –and sometimes
literally— left in the shadows.
Ultra Violet
The 'Ultra Violet: sketchbook' show constitutes an
installation based on the sketchbook Sassen always carried with her while
travelling in Ghana and through which her ideas for new compositions continued
to crystallize. Be they quotes, Polaroid’s or sketches, countless ideas,
inspiring statements and original materials follow each other in a random way
throughout the numerous pages that form Sassen’s sketchbook. Although in her
early work she always carefully selected and frame her subjects, the way she
worked in Ghana for the Prix de Rome stems from a more resolutely staged
practice. In an entirely suggestive way, Sassen’s sketchbook reveals that each
photograph embodies a thought, even if not always graphed before hand. Leafing
through it constitutes an invitation to lay unexpected connections between
varied ideas and inspiration sources. It intimates the possibility of tracking
the ungraspable birth of each composition that came to be part of Sassen’s
'Ultra Violet' collection of photographs, and takes us on a travel throughout
the creative unconscious of a natural born image-maker.
About the artist
Since she graduated from the Royal Academy of
Arnhem in 1997, Viviane Sassen (Amsterdam, 1972) has been combining freelance
assignments as a fashion photographer for established and underground
publications such as I-D, Purple and RE-Magazine with her own artistic work.
In 2002 and with increasing frequency during the years that followed, Sassen
travelled back and forth between the Netherlands and Africa bringing back
images from Zambia, South and East Africa.
Source: ‘Ultra violet sketchbook’, Catherine Somzé/ Juryrapport Prix de Rome
2007/ ‘Flamboya’, Catherine Somzé/ catalogus Prix de Rome, Edo Dijksterhuis’.
