In the fringes of UNSEEN 2024 #1
Viviane Sassen PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion at FOAM 21 September 2024 – 12 January 2025 (images 1-9)
Foam opens during the UNSEEN weekend the first large-scale retrospective of the Dutch fashion photographer and artist Viviane Sassen in the Netherlands. The exhibition PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion, which comprises more than 200 works, reveals over thirty years of her multifaceted career bringing together photography, collage, painting and video.
The Dutch contemporary artist Viviane Sassen rapidly gained worldwide recognition, both in the fashion industry and in the photography world. Her distinctive and eclectic visual oeuvre will fill almost the entire building of Foam. This exhibition will shed light on Sassen’s creative process by focusing on two main themes: the incessant search for new photographic forms and the importance of intimacy in her work.
The exhibition features iconic series, including Flamboya (2008), Umbra (2014) and Parasomnia (2011), along with unseen archives, mixed-media works that blend photography, painting, collage and video. Sassen’s fashion photography for brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dior will be presented in a monumental installation. Early experiments with objects from her personal archives, her initial self-portraits, and her final photo project from her studies illustrate the beginnings of Sassen’s visual language. These images are being showcased for the first time in the exhibition PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion.
Sassen’s oeuvre explores both the depths of human emotion and the boundaries of artistic expression. Death, sexuality, desire and connection with others are all motifs that structure her work. Renowned for her adept use of saturated colours, mastery of light and shadow, and distinctive depictions of the human body, Sassen’s work is a testament to her artistic language. For Sassen, photography is a magical medium. For her, photography is like a mirror that reflects what is already inside us, and likewise a portal to another universe with infinite possibilities. She sees endless worlds to discover.
Viviane Sassen (1972, Amsterdam) is a mixed-media artist. She studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). Sassen spent her childhood in Kenia, where her experiences served as the initial inspiration for her images. She later returned to Africa, creating the series Flamboya (2008), Parasomnia (2011), and Lexicon (2014), through which she gained recognition with a broader audience. Sassen is acclaimed for both her visual art and innovative fashion photography, with numerous publications in her name, including in New York Times Magazine, i-D, Numéro, POP, AnOther, and Dazed. Additionally, she has collaborated with renowned fashion brands such as Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Cartier, Armani, and Hermès.
Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
www.foam.org
Open daily 10am – 6pm, Thurs/Fri 10am – 9pm
In the fringes of UNSEEN 2024 #2
Paolo Cirio AI Attacks at FOAM till 27 September 2024 (images 10-14)
AI Attacks by Paolo Cirio (Italy, 1979) which builds upon the thematic project Photography Through the Lens of AI. Cirio is renowned for his long-standing and critical attitude towards AI systems, with a particular focus on their social implications. Through his work, he encourages public engagement and critical reflection on the consequences of technology, prompting societal change. The exhibition will also include a new series, titled Resurrect, which will premiere at Foam.
In AI Attacks, Paolo Cirio explores the shadows of technology, striving to challenge and rectify its misuse of power. He investigates the manipulation and ramifications of advanced AI systems across four immersive installations. Paolo Cirio’s activistic practice extends beyond artmaking and has indirectly influenced government policy. The artist sees AI as a form of automated violence, expressed through surveillance, discrimination, and disinformation. With his work, he challenges institutions by using AI for his counter attacks. The exhibition showcases the projects Capture, Obscurity, Street Ghosts and the new work Resurrect.
Paolo Cirio intervenes in societal domains influenced by technology, media, politics, and economics, addressing human rights, economic inequality, social justice, and democracy. He is known for many actions, including defrauding Google in 2005, addressing the theft of e-books from Amazon in 2006 and 60,000 financial news articles in 2014; having exposed over 200,000 Cayman Islands offshore firms in 2013; the hacking of Facebook through publishing 1 million users on a dating website in 2011. In 2020, he pirated over 100,000 Sotheby’s auction records and he attempted to profile 4000 French police officers with facial recognition..
Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
www.foam.org
Open daily 10am – 6pm, Thurs/Fri 10am – 9pm
In the fringes of UNSEEN 2024 3
Jeff Cowen Provence Works –Huis Marseille till 13 october (images 15-23)
Analogue craftsmanship and experiment
In a world that is dominated by digital screens, technology, speed and overproduction, Cowen seeks to draw our attention to the sublime experience of nature’s beauty through his work. As a photographic artist, he keeps well away from the digital world and has a real hands-on approach to the craftsmanship of the photographic process. He uses self-made enlargers to create large analogue prints on thick, wavy photographic paper. He experiments with darkroom techniques and chemical formulas, rendering each print a unique work.
While his photography encompasses all the traditional art historical genres, such as still life, landscape and portraiture, the alchemy in the darkroom during manual printing plays an important role, and in some works abstraction takes over.
The light of Provence
His working practices and the final result of Provence Works also make one think of painting. In the past, renowned artists such as Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh chose the region as a subject. The aesthetic of melancholy and the closeness with nature that they painted is also palpable in Cowen’s work. After years as a nomadic artist living and working in metropolises such as New York, Berlin and Paris, Cowen turned his lens to the Provençal terrain. The intensity of the mountainous landscape, the power of a simple artichoke, the vastness, and the often fiercely blue sky provide him with inspiration from nature in the same way as they did for Cézanne and Van Gogh. Through this work, he aligns himself with the artists who were able to translate their inspiration drawn from Provence into their art.
Cooperation between Huis Marseille and the Van Gogh Museum: parallel to the exhibition at Huis Marseille, the Van Gogh Museum will present a small group of works by Jeff Cowen in their permanent display, alongside drawings and paintings that Van Gogh produced while in Provence.
Jeff Cowen (b. 1966 in New York) grew up on New York’s Upper West Side and followed Oriental Studies at NY University & Waseda University in Tokyo. In the 1990s, he studied at the Arts Student League and the New York Studio School, where he learned drawing and painting. This is when he became interested in the interweaving of painting and photography. To him, the photographic image is never the end result but rather a starting point for his artistic reflection on the motif. His analogue prints, developed with the use of a range of chemicals, are often post-processed using painting and collage techniques. Cowen has lived in Europe since 2001. In 2021, he received a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant for his Provence Works.
Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
https://huismarseille.nl/en/exhibitions/jeff-cowen-2/
In the fringes of UNSEEN 2024 #4
Awoiska van der Molen – The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves Huis Marseille till 13 october (images 25-28)
Awoiska van der Molen (b. 1972 in Groningen). Critically acclaimed for her psychological landscape images, Awoiska van der Molen started out by photographing urban environments in 2003, shortly after graduating from art school. Now, more than twenty years on, she once again presents us with understated black-and-white photos of built-up environments that reveal traces of human presence. This time she zooms in on illuminated windows in the darkness of the evening.
The contours of this new direction in her work gradually emerged around 2015. ‘When I began photographing landscapes, there was still the occasional house in the frame. Back then, I slowly had to part ways with built-up areas. Now it’s actually the opposite.’ Departing the wilderness, she ventures into small villages and gazes upon windows behind which lives unfold.
Van der Molen encounters these windows while traveling through Japan in a regio where houses are constructed using traditional methods and materials. The walls are thin due to the mild climate.
From a distance, the photographer becomes aware of the daily activities behind the windows but without life truly revealing itself to her. Instead, the windows display patterns of shapes in shades of black, white, and grey. At the same time, that shadow play instils mystery into things, since the opaque-frosted glass subtly but resolutely obscures the interior world from view.
Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
https://huismarseille.nl
John Devos
