Viviane Sassen (born 1972 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch photographer whose work crosses fine art and fashion through saturated color, deep shadow, fragmented bodies, and concealed faces. Her childhood in Kenya informs themes of memory, displacement, and dreamlike projection.
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Viviane Sassen was born in Amsterdam in 1972. She studied fashion, photography, and fine art and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in Arnhem in 1997. She received the Prix de Rome in 2007 and ICP’s 2011 Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. She participated in MoMA’s New Photography 2011. Foam’s PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion (2023) surveyed more than thirty years of her career.*1
Sassen’s themes include the body, shadow, color, memory, Africa and Europe, displacement, intimacy, fashion, desire, sexuality, death, and the tension between seduction and unease. Her formal traits include saturated color, deep shadow, unusual viewpoints, fragmented bodies, hidden or covered faces, strong geometry, and painterly or collage-like interventions.*2 Her childhood in Kenya and later returns shaped the sense of memory, displacement, and dreamlike projection in works set in African countries. MoMA connects Parasomnia to mysterious residues of memory and anonymous subjects in intentionally unspecified African locations. Sassen’s own statement that she does not feel fully European, while in Africa she feels foreign, is important for interpreting displacement in Parasomnia.*3 Her practice developed at the intersection of fashion photography, fine-art photography, postcolonial questions of gaze and memory, and the museum recognition of hybrid photographic practice in the 2000s.*1
ICP’s Infinity Award profile records the movement between art and fashion in Sassen’s work, her international exhibition history, and her photographic work in Africa. Foam’s PHOSPHOR exhibition positions her career across art and fashion and emphasizes the search for new photographic forms. TIME discusses her use of shadow, color, place, and bodies as sculptural elements and cites her wish to hold beauty and unease together. By hiding faces, fragmenting bodies, and using shadow, Sassen suspends stable identity and asks viewers to encounter images as projection, fantasy, and archetype rather than straightforward portraiture.*4