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Lexicon, 20 September 2016 - 5 November 2016


International photo festival in Braga, showing the series Lexicon and video installation Hurtling by Viviane Sassen

“Lexicon” features images from Sassen’s acclaimed publications Flamboya (2008) and Parasomnia (2011) in addition to some previously unpublished photographs. Specifically for this installation, the photographs have all been printed at the same size, 30 x 42cm, like ‘cue cards’ to an understanding of the artist’s discourse.
Sassen describes the logic of the presentation as “a kind of ordered chaos. I never work in series; I rather build collections of related images. If you combine photographs in a particular way you can tell stories that go further than an isolated image.” The men and women in her photographs are in a sense also combinations of images; they are more compositions than individuals.
Sassen is not a portraitist, as she explains “I don’t show the face because I don't want the work to be about that person in the picture. What I am trying to capture or produce is an archetypal image, an image that goes beyond the description of the physiognomic and physical specificities of an individual. I seek to provide the work with a universal dimension, more abstract, more about mankind.”

Lexicon, 20 September 2016 - 5 November 2016
Encontros Da Imagem Photo festival
Braga, Portugal