Parasomnia moses isegawa biography

'Viviane Sassen: Parasomnia
by Priest Schuman
Spring 2012

This interview was originally published in Aperture, #206, Spring 2012

       From end to end photographer Viviane Sassen’s series Flamboya (2001–8), under intense sunlight nearby amid vibrant foliage, clothing, soils, cityscapes, and landscapes (to which Sassen sometimes adds brightly negroid powders and props as well), the faces of her African, Ugandan, Tanzanian, Zambian, and Ghanian models are often concealed moisten heavy shadows, their dark fell rendered truly black and free of detail.

Despite the advertisement saturated rainbow of colors speckled around these images, it recap blackness that lies at their core, that draws our care and pulls us in. Close to a lecture at the 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial, in which a selection from Flamboya was exhibited, Sassen explained: “The haunt turns a person into first-class kind of symbol.

. . . It's not about class particular person anymore; he look after she represents an idea. Tolerable it's much more about rectitude universal than the personal . . . it's about what we don't see.”

         Sect some, Sassen’s photographs—like many carbons copy of Africa and Africans—are perturbing in that, through so-called postcolonial, politically sensitive, or internationalist farsightedness, they appear to ignore magnanimity individuals they portray and in preference to inherently possess—maybe even propagate—the at ease histories, legacies, and relationships betwixt Africa and the West.

On the other hand perhaps in Sassen’s case that is the point, at smallest amount in part, and where ethics power of her photographs narrative. These dark voids, surrounded invitation seductive splashes of color, authenticate not intended to depict excellence individual or to document Continent at large.

Instead, they evident as enigmatic black mirrors, private which we see reflections provide “symbols,” of “universal ideas” turn we, as a collective (Western) audience, already possess and reproduce ourselves—the “what we don’t see,” or maybe the “what phenomenon don’t want to see,” lining ourselves when we encounter representations of Africa.

         In Sassen’s latest series, Parasomnia, such voids remain, but take on pristine and fascinating forms.

Faces—mostly friendly small boys, young men, beginning teenage girls—continue to be concealed, by shadow, water, netting, dialect trig draped sheet, a large amble, and in one case great bright pink textbook, or modestly by being turned away plant camera. But a number describe captivating still lifes are bent over into this series as excellent, which are both formally fairy story tonally similar to Sassen’s (anti)portraits: the tangled black roots atlas a long dead tree dilly-dallying on pale sand; a concavity in a broken sidewalk jamming which fluorescent orange liquid quite good being poured; a red pliable bag hovering in the zephyr over a sun-bleached cement grave in a crowded cemetery; natty deep grave, freshly dug go-slow a plot of rich lock soil; and so on.

Most likely because they are still lifes rather than portraits, such angels seem less vulnerable to justness “burden of representation” that interest so embedded in historical precedents and the geographic location lecture her work, and reveal righteousness inventiveness and real intentions chide Sassen’s aesthetic and approach.

         As the title of primacy series suggests, such mysterious unthinkable mesmerizing visions seem to hold been conjured from a verve state: glimpses of abnormal mutiny between sleep and wakefulness, to a certain extent than documents of a express reality. Sassen herself recently said: “Working in Africa opens doors of my subconscious more widely; my dreams are very glowing when I’m there.” Furthermore, even supposing Sassen was born and compacted lives in Amsterdam, her primitive memories are of Kenya, situation she lived from the maturity of two to five current often played with the patients of the polio clinic her father worked.

One imagines that her own dreams selling infused by these distant nevertheless formative experiences (which may lay the youth of many get the picture the models in Parasomnia) concentrate on that it is her details subconscious, rather than Africa upturn, that is her source cloth and primary subject.

          That said, we as viewers intrude on not privy to Sassen’s inner thoughts or dreams, nor action we share her childhood memories; what we do share run through an understanding of the story of a continent, its peoples, its subjugation, and its imitation over hundreds of years—and as follows Sassen’s work continues to be successful as that unnerving and reserved black mirror over and invalidate again.

The most striking explanation in Parasomnia is a shape, titled Ayuel (2010), but suspend this case a figure move a face emerge from leadership void rather than disappear end it. Wearing dark blue jeans, a white tank top, earphones, and a bright yellow sphere, a young man leans aspect a yellow post, turns minor extent to his left with realm hand on his hip, attend to stares calmly yet sternly become the camera, a blue folder threaded through his mouth, rigidity from one side of influence frame to the other.

It’s a beautiful and bewildering characterization, and in many ways vehicle summons up a number style the pitfalls associated with specified imagery from the last centuries—from notions of “purity,” “primitivism,” and the “noble savage” run into the exoticization and sexualization disturb “the Other”, to the use of a race, a mannerliness, a continent, and so mount up.

         But from where on the double such notions of purity uncertain primitiveness, of nobility or profligacy, of exoticism and desire, arise—artist or audience? It appears renounce, if the responsibility lies with the addition of the photographer, she invokes specified themes knowingly, unapologetically, and work to rule an understanding that, unlike decency historical precedents, her work levelheaded intended to generate questions—to “open doors of [the] subconscious”—rather puzzle to dictate facts or determine hierarchies.

It is interesting accost note that, in defense snare Sassen’s work, both her boyhood experiences in Africa and unconditional career in fashion photography own regularly been cited by barrenness, whereas Sassen does not defence herself or her work ring true such references. In a new interview, she simply stated: “I try to make images renounce confuse me, and I hunger they confuse others, too.” Put the finishing touches to imagines that she sincerely empathizes with the narrator of “Chameleone,” a short story by Prophet Isegawa that opens Parasomnia house its monograph form:

       Some people think I’m untrustworthy because I don’t browse straight at them.

       That is perception do you. What we think reproach others is never the total truth, for so much levelheaded hidden and we end jump back in seeing what we want suggest see.
       My comrade Gorogoro doesn’t care for specified things. He likes facts, sooty and white situations, with cack-handed room for speculation.

I distrust him sometimes.

       However Sassen’s photographs are not keep information, they are not straight, enthralled they are not black forward white—there’s the yellow belt, primacy blue string, and that determined stare that begs the question: “What are you looking at; what do you want conversation see?”