Fotografiska, The Berlin’s museum dedicated to contemporary photography presents an exhibition tracing the early artistic passions of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen from 1989 to the present day. It features self-portraits, fashion work, collages, and videos—all part of a shared, sensual, and multifaceted exploration of the female body.
The body, her body is an element that Vivian Sassen has made her subject very early on through compositions that defy traditional representations. A model herself during her student years and having posed for fashionable magazines like Purple and Cut, Sassen questions from her own experience the weight of the domination of the male gaze in an attempt to regain power over her own body and her desires. These scenes, with highly worked poses and makeup, already suggest a precise mastered way of working. On the border between sensuality and burlesque, for her Self-Portraits (1989-1989), Sassen uses makeup to distort reality and challenge us, the voyeur. But to understand Vivian Sassen’s gaze and what it stands for, perhaps we should recall her childhood in the mid-1970s in Kenya, where she lived near a hospital treating young people with polio. Her vision was thus built with the reality that a diversity of bodies exists and coexists and that beauty is found wherever we know how to look for it. Vivian Sassen then forged a relationship with others that is unique to her, which translates into a practice that breaks free from borders to summon our relationship to the world.
To do this, the photographer juggles between supports and plays with patterns to experiment with her subject: fertility in Of Mud And Lotus (2017) where the skin intertwines with natural elements metaphorically linked to motherhood such as eggs, milk or flowers in an experimental exchange of textures where faces fade away. A field of exploration and vast possibilities of interpretation that are realized in the mind of those who immerse themselves in it to its climax in her series of collages Consequence/Cadavre Exquis (2020-2024): large sculptures made from photographs of some things, such as sections of bodies, plastic elements, chairs, empty bottles or buckets and organic elements, such as flowers, bananas or even mushrooms; all painted, overturned, colored, assembled in a shimmering and playful fever.
At the far end of the exhibition, fashion works from her archives, spanning the past three decades, parade across the wall. These works serve as a reminder of how Vivian Sassen revolutionized fashion photography, restoring the body’s power of self-determination and deconstructing a raison d’être in fashion intended to satisfy fantasies.
Whether in her artistic experiments or her commercial photographs, Sassen inscribes a visual language imbued with great freedom, evoking dialogue, touch, curiosity, and beauty, in all its forms, both shown and deliberately concealed.
Noémie de Bellaigue
Viviane Sassen’s The Body as Sculptures is on view at Fotografiska Berlin until June 8, 2025.
Fotografiska Berlin
Oranienburger Str. 54
10117 Berlin
https://berlin.fotografiska.com
