We Folk

Tracing a career of more than thirty years, this retrospective book brings together both well and lesser known works and includes pieces from Sassen’s recent series, “Paint Studies,” in which early photographs are reimagined with ink and painterly marks, and “Venus and Mercury,” a collection of exquisite photomontages based on the history of the Palace of Versailles. Illuminating texts by Dawn Ades, Clothilde Morette, Simon Baker, Damarice Amao, and Dan Thawley make this the definitive overview of an important and ever-evolving photographer.

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‘Modern Alchemy’ is the brainchild of Viviane Sassen and Emanuele Coccia. The photographer and the philosopher—both leading figures in their fields—weaved together images and words, engaging in a fruitful dialogue deeply rooted in the Champagne terroir and the inspiring relationship Maison Perrier-Jouët entertains with art and nature.

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In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited to make a series of photographs throughout Versailles’s vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours, to wander and photograph extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette’s private correspondence. Venus & Mercury is brimming with Sassen’s surprising, pigment-splashed photomontages. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace’s many marble statues, Sassen reconfigured them to create hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender and call to mind traditions of Surrealist art.

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A Cookbook by Phillip Lim and Viviane Sassen, the idea for the book came from Lim’s frequent collaborator, Dutch artist Viviane Sassen, whose contributions to the volume include her photographs of outdoor markets in Africa. She layered the images with paint from Posca markers. “It’s like adding an unexpected element when you’re cooking,” she says. The book features 12 recipes, influenced primarily by the home cooking Lim ate as a kid. Other dishes are inspired by his childhood in Orange County’s Little Saigon and his trips to the markets in New York City’s Chinatown. “Through food,” he says, “you can express appreciation, respect and love for people—and for yourself, too.”

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This mid-career retrospective volume focuses on Viviane Sassen’s fine art photography, revealing a surrealist undercurrent in her work. Sassen recognizes Surrealism as one of her earliest artistic influences, seen in the uncanny shadows, fragmented bodies, and otherworldly landscapes she captures in her work.

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Of Mud and Lotus is Viviane’s second collaboration with Japanese collective artbeat publishers and G/P Gallery, Tokyo. As the title suggests, this body of work engages in a conversation on transformation, procreation and fecundity, all elements traditionally ascribed to the idea of the feminine.

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In Roxane II, Viviane Sassen and her muse Roxane continue writing their shared visual journal. The dynamic gallery of poses and moods touches notes at times sensual, at times tender. Images are equally about the performances in front of and behind the camera: Sassen’s presence is perceived through her shadow and made tangible by scraps of paper that bear the imprint of her breasts. This is a mutual portrait, an exchange in which the artist’s and model’s individualities blur, leaving traces on each other.

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Known for her imaginative approach to fashion photography, Sassen’s lens here captures mundane objects, making them appear extraordinary against the background of nature’s overwhelming presence. Largely shot in black and white, the informal photos also capture a sense of Sassen’s personal connection to a remote village on the Upper Suriname River, which is inhabited by the ancestors of formerly enslaved people who escaped Dutch rule. ‘This project is an exploration of the beauty of the everyday’ writes Sassen in her introduction ‘an investigation of the sculptural qualities of the ordinary’.

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UMBRA delves into the world of shadows, but it is also the story of light, from its blinding qualities to its brittle brightness. The ever conflicting pull of light and darkness kicked off the quest for imagery of what can not be contained: a world continuously in motion, the mind unable to decide which direction to take. Shadow, eventually, as a force of life, and not only the negation of light.

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Etan & Me is a story of love and loss, of Eros and Thanatos. It’s a story about the exploration of the Self and the Other. Are we ever able to truly know someone, to truly know ourselves?

In a remote village in the jungle of the Suriname, Viviane took portraits of this young man called Etan and combined them with blurred and scattered self-portraits, reflecting on the ancient myths of Narcissus and the Origin of Painting by Pliny the Elder.

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Originally produced as an initiative for Swedish fashion brand Our Legacy in 2009 as an alternative to a runway show, Dutch artist and photographer Viviane Sassen was commissioned to portray androgyny and beauty as key principle. Revised and re-released 2013 in a limited second edition.

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Viviane Sassen continues her equally playful and incisive explorations of contemporary African culture, visuality and desire with Die Son Sien Alles. Published by the brilliant Libraryman (Stockholm) in an extremely limited edition, this stunning volume captures the vibrant, poster-strewn interiors of shantytown dwellings and businesses in Cape Town.

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Bringing together seventeen years of work in the fashion world, this eye-catching volume features selections from Sassen’s award-winning series and campaigns for Stella McCartney, Adidas, Carven, Bergdorf Goodman, MiuMiu, and M Missoni, along with editorials for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, i-D, Numero, Purple, AnOther Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Fantastic Man, and POP.

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Parasomnia is the third monograph of award winning Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen. The photographs are shot throughout West and East Africa and explore the theme of Parasomnia, the sleep disorder in which a person has strange dreams, behaviours and movements. The book opens with a short story from Moses Isegawa and from there Sassen’s photographs aim to confuse and thrill you. The photographs remain somewhere between realism and surrealism. She employs colour and bold compositions to startling effect.

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This was the first comprehensive catalogue to feature the independent work of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen. It includes over fifty photographs taken across Africa from Cape Town to Kenya and Zambia that disregard traditional boundaries of genre and tackle the problematic bond between photography, imperialism and the colonial imaginary.

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