Viviane Sassen

Listings(s)

'No Fashion, Please! Photography between Gender and Lifestyle'

Steven Cohen and Viviane Sassen at Kunsthalle Wien

The rejection of traditional ideas of fashion and beauty characterizes the second show of the Kunsthalle Wien’s autumn programme focusing on photography and fashion. Nineteen solo presentations outline the contemporary international photography scene that explores the fundamental relationship between bodies and clothes, the dialectics between the form of the body and its appearance. The selected photographers are rooted in the tradition of body art and strongly rely on references to installations, ceremonies, and rituals. Borders to other disciplines are crossed in both daring and reckless experiments. In the context of the exhibition, clothes and other products of the fashion industry only figure as fragments of a narrative mise-en-scène thematizing the dreams concerned with a changing aesthetic of the body and its ideals. The media strategies employed are manifold and span from staged photographic images, projections, and performances to body sculptures, video and film works.

10 November 2011 - 22 January 2012

Paris Photo

Jodi Bieber, Joel Andrianomearisoa, Billy Monk, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Tshabangu, Cedric Nunn, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky, Viviane Sassen, Moshekwa Langa, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at Grand Palais

The annual Paris Photo will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the Grand Palais, featuring 117 galleries from some 23 countries presenting the best of 19th century, modern and contemporary photography in the heart of the French capital. This year's special focus is on African photography from Bamako to Cape Town, with several South African artists in the spotlight in the main venue as well as on other shows around the city (such as the skyroof of the Gare du Nord station). South African galleries  STEVENSON, Goodman Gallery, Bailey Seippel, and Gallery MOMO will be exhibiting.

10 November 2011 - 13 November 2011

Summer 2010/11

Anton Kannemeyer, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Hylton Nel, Viviane Sassen and Claudette Schreuders at Stevenson in Cape Town

Anton Kannemeyer, following his successful exhibition with the gallery in May this year and the publication of his much-debated Pappa in Afrika book, will show the final works in his Alphabet of Democracy series. The artist has been working on this series for the past five years, chronicling the absurdities of life in the democratic South Africa; his imagery subverts the narrative, history and myth of the ‘rainbow nation’ with acute humour and critique. This exhibition will be accompanied by a book, published by Jacana, bringing together the approximately 70 images in the series.

Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen (Amsterdam, 1972) will exhibit at the gallery for the first time. Sassen grew up in East Africa and has been taking photographs on the continent since her first return visit in 2002. Her imagery is infused with memories of her youth, from the beauty of the landscape and the children with whom she used to play to the poverty of the shanty towns and her doctor-father's terminally ill patients. She will show new work alongside some images from her Flamboya and Ultra Violet series, for which she won the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007. According to the judges, ‘Sassen knows how to go beyond the confines of her subject. The photographs do not just portray death, loss and urban life in Africa. They show genuine humanity, cultural clichés, Sassen's personal life story and aesthetics.’

Claudette Schreuders will show five new sculptures, prior to a solo exhibition in April 2011 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. This is the first time since 2004 that she has exhibited a significant group of sculptures in South Africa. The new series is entitled Close, close, taken from a poem by Elisabeth Bishop which describes a sleeping couple and reflects on the ‘closeness’ being both comforting and stifling:

Close, close all night
the lovers keep
They turn together,
in their sleep …

Schreuders’ previous series of sculptures, 'The Fall', dealt with the trajectory of a couple’s relationship. 'Close, close' picks up the story after the arrival of children. Where her work till now has consisted mostly of single figures, in this group the individual figure largely disappears, with each of the sculptures featuring two or more figures carved from a single block of wood. On show will also be a series of drawings inspired by historical and contemporary sculptures that grapple with the challenges of incorporating more than one figure into a single sculpture.

The winner of the 2010 Tollman Award for Visual Art, Serge Alain Nitegeka, will show meditations on form based on his experience of Johannesburg. Nitegeka writes:

What occupies my mind is the question of how to reduce or even organise the 'surplus' and clutter of urban shapes to simple lines and forms that allow focus and appreciation. These works arose out of a curiosity about the everyday shapes, forms and structures of a city, and human access and relations to them ... In a contemplative process of looking and re-looking, I create forms that appear as abstracted versions of original shapes. During this process, the familiarity of form is lost; their individuality disappears and dissolves into simple abstraction.

In anticipation of Hylton Nel’s 70th birthday in 2011, the gallery will exhibit recent works by the artist for the first time in five years. Nel continues to develop his distinctive style of work, rich in references to the decorative arts, literary and art-historical sources, and South African life. His plates, bowls, vases, plaques and figurative pieces are idiosyncratically decorated with witty and sometimes poignant line drawings and script. His imagery ranges from penises to madonnas, cats to angels, and his quotes are drawn from poetry and the daily press as well as his observations of the world around him. The occasion will also be celebrated by a new book on Nel’s work by Michael Stevenson, published by Jacana.

02 December 2010 - 15 January 2011

'Parasomnia'

Viviane Sassen at Stevenson in Cape Town

Parasomnia brings together photographs from Sassen's recent Parasomnia series and some from her previous series, Flamboya.

Sassen spent her childhood years in East Africa. She describes that, on her family's return to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland but knew that she had also been an outsider in Africa. Parasomnia animates these feelings of dislocation between home and away, night and day, life and dreams. The series comprises photographs taken in West and East Africa over the past two years, as well as a few taken in Europe, which frame her enigmatic and often haunting narratives.

As a New York Times critic recently noted (in a review of the Museum of Modern Art's New Photography exhibition), Sassen's images 'convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception'. Her photographs constantly disrupt our usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed while others are incidental scenes she encounters on her travels, leaving us unsure which are her imaginary fictions and which scenes from life. Her distinct visual language is articulated by a deep awareness of the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography, as well as an acute sense of colour and the optical resonances of pattern and design.

19 January 2012 - 25 February 2012