My name is Viviane Sassen and those scars are not my own scars

On the occasion of a travelling retrospective, Sassen looked into her archives and rediscovered a body of work she made while studying in an MFA program. Folio interrogates the preoccupations of her youth

Viviane Sassen’s singular vision of photography has earned her a remarkable blend of popular appeal and critical notoriety. Her images are striking, often featuring stark forms and bold colors. She has the distinct ability to present the body as a geometric form. Sassen’s commercial work has graced the pages of the world’s most read fashion magazine; she has shot billboards, and has worked with crushingly famous models and actors on iconic campaigns. Her artistic work is often far stranger, joining the uncanny and the aesthetic in iconic compositions. She ambidextrously moves from highly choreographed stagings to observational snapshots as she approaches her conceptually driven exhibitions and publications.

Through a process of objectification, she presents a humanistic vision of the world in which we are no more and no less than the forms which carry our beings. In her new book, Folio, we can see this in how Sassen treats scars, presenting them as physical material with a cool ambivalence. Also, through her gaze we can perceive the existential resonance of scars, they are also deformations to the ideal of a body. The physical world is composed of objects; we are just objects. This does not negate our experience of the world as sentient, sensitive beings, but is rather the context within which it all exists.

On the occasion of a travelling retrospective, Sassen looked into her archives and rediscovered a body of work she made while studying in an MFA program. Folio interrogates the preoccupations of her youth, a period of time she describes as teeming with new experience and discoveries but which was marked by incredible pain and angst. With some distance, this work has gained new resonance for her. Stylistically it is quite different from her current images, but present in this series are many of the fixations she has spent her career investigating. The work is both playful and dark, meditating on death and sexuality simultaneously.

Our conversation was marked by Sassen’s resounding honesty, candidness, and curiosity. She would often discuss a thesis, her life experiences around the time of a project, and then make connections between these things. She seemed open to question her work, and curious to hear why I was asking the questions I was. This process of intrigue and exploration marks her artistic practice with a delightful freshness. At one point, she told me that she often wonders if she repeats the same idea, over and over again. This does not seem to be a fitting description of how her curiosity has carried her through a disparate range of projects with an infectious vitality. Perhaps it is this fear, the fear of stagnation, the fear of not living enough, that bleeds through her images and has made her one of our favorite photographers.

My name is Viviane Sassen

My name is Viviane Sassen, and I’m an artist and photographer based in Amsterdam. What else do you want to know? I am in my studio space, and, behind me are some works that I took from my archive downstairs, and some works by other artists as well.

Which is the period of work contained in folio. I know it’s from a bit earlier.

It’s a body of work that I made in the 1990s. At that point I had just, graduated from art school and, I was asked to participate in a Masters of Fine Arts program for one year, and this is when I made this body of work. The reason that I rediscovered it, is because I’ve been working on a broad survey of my work, so far, which was been shown in Paris at the MEP, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, last fall. Then it went to, Kyoto, to Kyotographie. Griffey. Now it’s in Shanghai. And then in September, it’s will be coming to FOAM, a museum in Amsterdam.

For this overview exhibition, I went back into my archive and rediscovered these works. I thought it was interesting to make them part of the exhibition, because I saw that they contained the early development of my own personal style. The guys from in Paris, were interested in doing a book about this particular series of work.

What are some elements of this book that, you feel as if you’ve left behind as you have moved forward with your career and style?

My work over time became less raw, in a way. I think these pictures were all made with small format, analog cameras; often with snapshot cameras, which we used a lot in the 90s. They’re kind of grainy and they have a particular feel to them. Of course, the photographic medium, the materials actually, have changed. My work now looks different because I use different kind of the cameras etc. But apart from that, what did I leave behind?

I wouldn’t say I left anything behind. I could easily go back to that, but I think it is a way of experimentation––but I don’t think I left experimentation behind, because I think experimentation is a running thread throughout my work––But, I left behind. Maybe at that time I was still working a lot with, my own body. In these pictures, my own hands, for instance, or feet or whatever. I also showed a lot of my friends. I think those are things that changed over time, and I don’t really take pictures of my friends or myself anymore.

I’m curious, across some of these images, there’s, there are a few images where scars come strongly into focus and it’s also something that I haven’t seen in much of your recent work, where the body is presented kind of as this. Can you tell me a bit about what you were interested in when you captured those images?

Those scars are not my own scars. They were my friends’. In a way, they represent this kind of coming of age narrative of how people my age, my friends and also myself, were struggling to just become an adult. It’s often not an easy time, when you are in your mid 20s or so, it’s often kind of rough. I think the scars represent that.

At the time I was also really interested in making work about the body which was somehow linked to the medical world or disease. My father was a doctor. When we lived in Africa, he worked in a local hospital. I still have very strong memories of that period of time. While I was making body work, he had just passed away a year or two before, this wound was very still very fresh, I was still grieving his loss. I made a different series, the year this one, which was black and white and much more about his death. I think this work is more about the vulnerability of the body, exploring the body with a certain gaze. It’s almost like when you pass the scene of an accident, and you want to look and then you want to look away. There’s this paradox, this ambiguity, it’s like the push and the pull of it.

I’m curious to hear a bit more about how growing up with such close contact to, the medical professions and the polio clinic you’ve talked about, shaped your understanding of the human body, as an object that you would practice art upon later. You’re talking a lot about the vulnerability, but, there’s also this concreteness to your work, to the body as the physical object that, is both no more and no less than its biological presence and physicality. Was this a moment of departure in how you were thinking about the body?

I think I connected the body with a kind of violence after all my experiences. But also, that was something that attracted me, that deformation of the body is something that I’ve always been very interested in. Not as something exotic, but something that was part of me, was me, as well. It as something which was very close to me somehow. I remember standing in front of the mirror when I was young and just making really weird shapes with my body, and then looking with one eye and then the other. I would treat my body like a sculpture just by changing the angle of my eye.

When I was young, we lived in Kenya, next to the crippled home. And the crippled home was the name of this place where kids who had polio lived. Polio leads to these awful deformations of the body. When I was young, I didn’t see them as something serious or painful. I just saw them as kids who were my friends and who were beautiful. I saw that they were very different from me, my limbs look different from theirs, but I thought there was a certain beauty in that. They was long before I realized that they had a very serious illness.

You were talking about the experience of making a sculpture of your body when you were young. There are these moments in folio where body parts come together to almost represent another body parts, hands that come together to form something else.

Yeah. Like look kind of phallic. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah [Viviane laughs]. I thought it was very funny.

There’s obviously this play, but there is also that push and pull that you were talking about. Can you tell me about these images?

I think it had something to do with this realm which connects the brutal with the beautiful, or the uncanny with…I know that I should finish my sentences when I start one, but I lost my thread. I have these days when my brain is not functioning well, and I’m very tired. Today is one of those days. I’m so sorry, but maybe you can just repeat your question or just ask it in another way, and then I’m sure I can pick it up again somehow.

Something that I’m interested in is the the phallic quality of these images. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe them as sensual or, even sexual.

I think there’s sexuality in there. Definitely. I do think so. But there is also something which is slightly grotesque about them. In that way, some of them are kind of subversive. That was very intentional, at the time. A few things just came together. I was influenced both by the passing of my father, but also the memory of his medical background. For a very long time, he was a GP and his practice was in our home, downstairs. There was always death and sickness around. Or urgent medical concerns, people would come to the house. As a sensitive child, this definitely made an impression on me.

When I was 19,I went to India and I became very ill. I was hospitalized, and I lost so much weight, seven kilos of fluid, in just two days. I started hallucinating and I saw myself at die and get dragged down the mountain in a coffin. It was a horrible experience. And then my father died. He ended his own life when I was 22. All these things were just issues that were haunting me. Art has always been a catalyst for me to deal with these personal issues.

In terms of the sexual aspect of the work… In my early 20s, I had my first real relationships, and was also exploring my own sexuality. I was experiencing my first real relationships and breakups, etc., which can also be not literally violent, but still strong impressions. All of this mixed together to make for this work to appear.

You’ve talked a lot about psychoanalysis. I think that it is interesting that your first note in answering a question about sexuality is to discuss its connection with death. I think that definitely comes through in these images. At the time, were you reading the work of psychoanalysts to process these feelings? Or is it looking back that you start to see yourself working through these ideas?

I can’t really remember. I think also started therapy around the time my father passed away. But I can’t remember reading a lot about Jung, for instance. I don’t think so, I think that was later, maybe.

You said in an interview once that, “if the whole world were to go into psychotherapy, I think Africa would be like the shadow”. There’s this interesting aspect of your work where the body is just this form, and there’s so much room for people to push their own interpretations on to an image, that it maybe the discussion, takes a step back from, what the piece of art is doing, and instead just gives a mirror for people to experience their own inventions. What is the experience, as a photographer, creating images that allow for so much of this, personal reflection for people?

That’s very much about how people perceive Africa, they have all these preconceived ideas about what Africa is, but they’ve never been there. So I feel that there’s often this kind of idea of Africa as a dangerous place people are hesitant to travel. In their subconscious or unconscious or whatever, they feel that Africa is a dangerous place. It somehow connects to their own personal shadow, their own preconceived ideas. People think that that Africa is like this exotic place where they often either feel threatened or they think it’s exotic. It is an interesting thought to connect that with the psyche. The archetype of the shadow as, Jung described it, is that part of our personality that we don’t want to see, that we are afraid of or ashamed of. I think people in the west project their own fears, their own darkness, upon this idea of Africa.

Do you these projections affect how people talk about your work?

I don’t hear people telling me, in detail, what they think or what they feel when they look at my images. Its either like, “yeah, that’s great”, or they don’t say anything, or people would criticize me for being a white woman going to Africa and spending time there and making work. There’s the whole political debate about representation and cultural appropriation, etc.., But that that’s a different discussion, I think. But also linked to what we’re talking about. I often feel that people who have never been have a paternalistic feeling that they often want to want to preach to me. Or, people just have no idea, they ask “how do you communicate with these people and how do you stay in touch?”. And then I have to tell them, “We speak, we have phones, we’re on Instagram, we have emails. They speak English,” people have no clue.

You say in the ABCs at the end of folio, which I so love… I really liked them. I thought it was a nice way to capturing some of the connection, they’re so playful too. You said in one of them that you were young then and that you’re glad to no longer be young. Can you tell me a bit more about that? I think we’ve circled around this a bit, but I’m curious to hear more about that.

When I was young, I had this strong, existential fear, a fear of death. It was very much related to the fact that my father passed away. In India, I truly I was going to die. So I developed these panic attacks. A kind of anxiety disorder. I struggled with that for a very long time.

I think getting older and experiencing more life itself, just made me much happier and much more relaxed. I think being young, has lots of advantages, but it’s also a struggle, often. Mental health is very important. For young people, it’s very important to understand that when they’re struggling, things do get better, most of the time, when you get older.

[I crossed my fingers, to which Viviane smiled and said the following]

Yeah. They do. They really do. It’s good to hear this from people who have experienced it for themselves. It gets better, don’t worry, you’ll get there.

Do you find that your well of inspiration has changed now that you aren’t so haunted?

Oh, definitely. I think, I always think that life and art always have a connection. When I was young, I made a lot of self-portraits, and the sexual thing was much more present in my work at some points––although I do make weird collages nowadays, which have a kind of brutality in a quite sexual way, so maybe it never really, left me––You go through different phases in life, and these phases are all reflected in my work somehow.

I was reading a book the other week, it may have been Roberto Bolaño, and there was a line in it that was something like, “all art made by young people is a reflection of themselves. Good juvenilia is when there’s something more universal in that reflection”.

That makes sense, but I think that all artists make self-portraits. Even if you make abstract or very conceptual art, it’s hard to get away from yourself. It’s fine too. Sometimes I think, “okay, I just keep repeating myself and just with the same themes over and over again”. And I can’t seem to, break out of that circle. I don’t know if that’s a problem or not. Things do change. I think it’s great to evolve with your work and to take on different things. Explore, keep on exploring.

My last question is about, the pacing of the book and the curation of your exhibit. How do you create rhythm across these things? These images were taken from a long period of time, and then you bring them together sequentially in a way that they weren’t originally.

The book is very much like the book that I made back then, in the 90s. I made a little book, at the time using photo copies. This was pre-computer, so I was working in a copy shop, on the Xerox machine. This is almost a one-to-one copy of that. I worked endlessly on that first one.

Isaac Crown Manesis