Two Viviane Sassen exhibitions, one in Italy, the other in Germany, both chosen and covered by our two local correspondents: we thought it would be interesting to bring them together!
This Body Made of Stardust by Viviane Sassen, exhibition presented by Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, engages visitors with striking images that challenge emotions. They compose a non-narrative structure made of visual fragments and formal or intuitive links between (seemingly) disparate images, introducing us to a dreamlike universe. This disturbing yet reassuring universe has dreamlike qualities reminiscent of Surrealism and embraces the artist’s obsessions, fantasies, memories and fears, connecting them with the outside world. The exhibition features more than fifty photographs and a video (dating from 2005 to 2025), including new works created for this exhibition.
“Images are dreamt long before they materialise: they are trunks and foliage stemming from tangled roots, they are a young unconscious body carried in a shroud, a scintillating red coffin: the strong echo of loss”, Federica Angelucci writes, highlighting the exhibition’s underlying theme: the concept and iconography of the memento mori. In fact, according to Susan Sontag, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability”. Yet Sassen does something different. While attempting to grant structure to chaos, she transforms the Latin term into her own memento amoris: an invitation to embrace the beauty and wonder of transformation, offering a poetic and visionary perspective on the transience of life (we are dust, but that dust is stardust).
Vivian Sassen explains that she takes photographs because “photography has something magical about it, because it connects the living and the dead; it allows paradoxes and enables things in the world to interconnect. Photographs must amaze and shake. I don’t necessarily want to reveal everything; often, viewers cannot guess the context in which the photo was taken or see faces.” It’s a way of abstracting a subject from contingency and elevating it to a universal level. This emerges from her images, which are difficult to interpret due to their multiple layers of meaning, ranging from the fragility of the earth to images of wrapped-up bodies, as well as stones and roots, and is also due to the variety of techniques she uses, including photography, collage, painting and video.
Marco Scotini says that he is not so sure that Sassen’s photographs “portray death (its semiotic, emblematic nature) as their subject”, even though they contain “chilling (but alluring)” traces. Instead, “through this constant iconographic allusion, these images seem to shed light on photography’s mode of being: on its temporal condition, its special status in regard to reality”. The viewer is both urged and disturbed by the fact that “each photo evinces a double nature: presence turns into absence, movement into immobility, the familiar into ‘uncanny’”. The images of Africa, where Sassen lived as a child, transcend the documentary and naturalistic dimensions, incorporating introspection, imagination and a veil of mystery. Her memories and experiences then yielded intense images, with original staged photography, included a touch of the ‘unexpected’, bringing her works closer to the oneiric world.
The exhibition also includes collages from the series ‘Cadavre Exquis’, an emblematic subject related to the deaths of people very close to the artist. “The regret of not having had the courage to hug my grandmother one last time and say goodbye to her has been alleviated somewhat over time. And photography helped me to grieve (in the meantime, my father had also passed away) and accept the idea of death.”
The works by Sassen are in dialogue with sculptures by Evgeny Antufiev, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Fabrizio Prevedello and Tarwuk from Collezione Maramotti. Sassen’s approach to photography is deeply influenced by three-dimensional art, design and fashion. Her research on light and shadow, colour and form, has led her to develop an innovative and hybrid visual language. Using vibrant and intense colours, thanks to paint, ink and collage, she adds another dimension to the photographic image.
The exhibition, which is part of the twentieth Fotografia Europea festival, Being Twenty, is curated by the artist herself. The catalogue, with texts by Federica Angelucci, Maria Barnas and Marco Scotini, is published by Dario Cimorelli editore.
Paola Sammartano
Viviane Sassen. This Body Made of Stardust
Until July 27, 2025
Collezione Maramotti
Via Fratelli Cervi 66
42124 Reggio Emilia
Italy
https://www.collezionemaramotti.org/en
