• Tweet

DRY SPIKES: Laundry

HOLE EARTH: Nadir

 My photographs constantly disrupt usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed 

RELATED ARTICLES

• Turning wood to art

Visual artist Viviane Sassen is presenting a photographic exhibition at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town until February 25.

Born in Amsterdam in 1972, she displays photographs from her bookParasomniaand some from her previous series.

The exhibition takes the viewer to Sassen's years in East Africa.

She says when she returned to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland, but that she had also been an outsider in Africa.

Her exhibition animates the feelings of dislocation between home and away, night and day, life and dreams. The photographs were taken in West and East Africa over the past two years and a few were taken in Europe. The photographs have mysterious and often haunting narratives.

Sassen's images convey how strangely vivid and tantalisingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception.

"My photographs constantly disrupt usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed. Others are incidental scenes that challenge viewers on which are my imaginary fictions or scenes from life."

Her distinct visual language is articulated by a deep awareness of the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography. There is an acute sense of colour and the optical resonances of pattern and design.

The exhibition is accompanied by her latest book, titled Parasomnia.

She first studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts and Ateliers Arnhem.

Her work was first published in avant-garde fashion magazines and she is regularly commissioned by prominent designers.

She won the Dutch art prize, Prix de Rome, in 2007 and the International Centre of Photography in New York's Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography in 2011.