VIVIANE SASSEN
calendar Pikin SleePikin Slee, 5 July 2015 - 13 September 2015
Viviane Sassen (b. 1972, NL) has garnered parallel critical acclaim as a fashion photographer and in the context of contemporary visual art. The exhibition at Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt focuses on a body of work that Sassen made in Pikin Slee, Surinam in 2013. The Saramacca community lives isolated from the outside world, living without running water, electricity, roads or the internet.
In search of a new visual language, Viviane Sassen travelled to the village of Pikin Slee for the first time in 2012. Situated at the head of the Surinam River, in the middle of the rain forest of the South American Surinam Republic, the village is almost totally cut off from civilisation. The only way to access it is by canoe, a journey of about three hours up-river. The villagers live today as their forbears did in unison with nature. They grow their own food on small agricultural plots, producing cassava bread, pressed maripa palm oil and dried coconut.
Shot mainly in black and white, the analogue, small-format photographs form a series of abstract compositions and elusive subjects. Both rigorously composed and poetically interpreted, they are an exploration of the beauty of the everyday and the sculptural qualities of the ordinary. Viviane Sassen has captured the unostentatious sculptural beauty produced by the interplay of apparently banal everyday objects in the middle of stunning natural surroundings.
Pikin Slee, 5 July 2015 - 13 September 2015
Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt
Biel, Switzerland
