Artist Viviane Sassen in conversation with curator and writer Lou Stoppard

Memento

Artist Viviane Sassen will engage in conversation with curator and writer Lou Stoppard in the framework of the exhibition Memento. Viviane Sassen’s photography, with which Huis Marseille has a special connection, is both intuitive and determined; an intriguing interplay of desire. Lou Stoppard contributed a text about Sassen and the other photographers in the Red Room, with a special focus on fashion photography and the colour red, for the zine A Feeling of Wanting, published on occasion of the anniversary exhibition Memento. Together, the photographer and the writer will discuss vision and fashion, conviction and intuition.

About Viviane Sassen

The photography of Viviane Sassen (Amsterdam, 1972) is in a class of its own. The intuitive way in which Sasses approaches her subjects is entirely personal, independent of other examples or reference frameworks. She often seeds the body as a sculpture, and concepts of revelations and concealment help to create the riddles in her images. Sassen makes effective use of the mystery of shadow and the flamboyant expressivity of colour. She has also achieved a special intimacy with certain models, so that her photos can sometimes be erotic, but at the same time they can be open, rich in contrast, or explosive. Her images are invariably intriguing and remarkable, and they are, occassionally, somewhat surreal. Over the course of her career Viviane Sassen has produced a flood of marvellous images, many of which are of Africa, the continent in which she spent part of her youth.

About Lou Stoppard

Lou Stoppard (b.1990, Luton) is a British writer and curator who works across both digital and physical spaces, and writes both fiction and non-fiction. She has written for The Financial Times, Aperture, The New York Times and The New Yorker and published several books on photography, such as Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography.