“All images are memento mori.
To take {a photograph} is to take part in
one other individual’s (or factor’s) mortality,
vulnerability, mutability. Exactly by slicing
out this second and freezing it, all
images testify to time’s relentless soften.”
—S. Sontag, On Images
The present—which is a part of the 20 th Fotografia Europea pageant, Being Twenty—is essentially the most intensive presentation of Sassen’s work in Italy so far and is curated by the artist herself.
Revolving across the idea and iconography of the memento mori, the images on view hint branching paths by the infinite potentialities and nuances of life. It seems fertile, intense, and overflowing, but in addition intrinsically fragile: (abstractions of) human our bodies, landscapes, mud, earth and natural matter turn into symbols and recurring reminders of dying—an inevitable passage within the transformation of all that lives.
By way of a non-narrative construction constructed from visible fragments and formal hyperlinks between photos that appear very totally different, Sassen invitations us right into a many-sided, dreamlike, seductive universe distilled drop by drop from on a regular basis life and instilled with Surrealism, flowing out of the artist’s interplay (her fantasies, obsessions, reminiscences and fears) with the surface world.
Forming a dialogue with sculptures from Collezione Maramotti (by Evgeny Antufiev, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Fabrizio Prevedello and TARWUK) to which Sassen felt an instantaneous affinity, the pictures within the present are drawn from totally different sequence of works in her huge archive, which the artist has been transforming into totally different configurations for years now, in a type of long-term investigative undertaking.
Sassen, who has a deep connection to three-dimensional artwork, in addition to design and vogue, additionally calls herself a sculptor. She shapes mild—and, above all, shadow, a metaphor for the torments and wishes of the human psyche; she molds our bodies and objects; she forges daring, vibrant, intense colors, even introducing paint, ink, and collage into her apply so as to add a brand new dimension to the photographic picture.
Her multiform works seize and maintain the gaze within the gaps of their thriller, perpetually producing new ripples and ranges of that means. By way of a means of layering, Sassen reveals what’s hidden underneath the floor. Nearly nothing is what it appears at first look; on this interlacing of actuality and fiction, inside ambiguous compositions that appear to shift and reform each time we take a look at them, our perceptions are always known as into query.
We encounter a big palm frond clasped in two younger folks’s embrace; a proliferation of crops and fungi, clusters of cells and rhizomatic creatures; faceless our bodies of flesh and stone, mutilated and disjointed, cradled by the earth or the water, wrapped up, enveloped, repeatedly posed and recomposed; tree trunks standing like stelae and graves on the thresholds of unknown realms; unwitting, shapeshifting warriors of the longer term. In her try and “grant construction to chaos,” Sassen transfigures the traditional Latin time period into her personal memento amoris, inviting viewers to see the sweetness and awe of passage. We’re mud (and to mud we’ll return), however that mud is stardust.
at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
till July 27, 2025
