Beyond Desire

Viviane Sassen: I try to blur the boundaries between reality and abstraction, and explore identity in a more fluid, poetic way. I’m really drawn to the idea of ambiguity and transformation. By re-imagining the body in all its varieties, these visual manipulations become a metaphor for freedom – liberating both subject and viewer from fixed notions of identity, beauty and form.

VS: Yes, I think these bodies of work are more challenging for the viewer than some of my other work as they distort, fragment and obscure the human body in a profound way. They bring us to the realm of the subconscious, the dream world, where things are fluid and have their own logic. Surrealism has always played a major part in my work.

VS: The concept of photography is, in itself, very dualistic: It freezes time in space. Duality, the paradox, ambiguity – these are the key elements I thrive on. I think you could draw parallels between sculpture and photography – both mediums capture matter – I’m just more lazy and impatient than the average sculptor.

VS: I don’t think I really have the ability to make people change their minds about their body. But in the most positive scenario, then yes, maybe people will realize that their body is a dynamic sculpture as well.

VS: I strongly believe in diversity and the beauty of it, when it comes to the human body. However, I also experience that the mainstream fashion industry is still pretty rigid when it comes to beauty standards. I also think that most of us are wise enough to understand that the fashion world is selling dreams and fairytales. When working on my art projects, I feel I’m much more free to explore a wider range of possibilities.

I think I’ve been intrigued by the body from a very young age. I spent some of my most formative years in Kenya, where my father worked as a doctor in a small local hospital. This was in the mid-seventies, and things were much less advanced than they are now. Sickness and death were much more visible, out in the open. Decay goes much quicker in the tropics, a banana peel would rot and decay in a matter of days instead of years. Another thing that made a big impact on me at that time in Kenya was that we lived next door to a home for children who suffered from polio. At the time, I was too young to understand the serious condition my friends were in. I thought the shapes of their bodies were maybe a bit out of the ordinary, but definitely beautiful.

VS: I think desire has always been linked to disguise in my mind. It is crucial to both hide and reveal to trigger desire – there should be some mystery. You can see in my work that when an image is more sexual, erotic, you usually won’t see a face.

VS: I’m not sure we can go completely without some sort of external projections when it comes to desire, maybe in a kind of ancient sensory and instinctual way – how we were as infants? We are very much conditioned by language, meaning, images and symbols. But I do think that when it comes to desire, many women speak a different language than men. I guess many of us need more context. It can still be carnal, explicit, but our largest sexual organ is the brain rather than what’s between our legs. Yes, I’m brutally exaggerating here!

VS: Well, this body of work was informed by motherhood. I had become a mother myself not long before. A huge bodily transformation you just have to give in to, let it all happen. Nature at its finest, it was just so incredible to experience… both the good, the bad and the ugly. This series was about surrender; I had to surrender my own body – there was not much space left for analytical thought. The project I did before Of Mud and Lotus, was UMBRA. That was about the notion of the shadow, questions about death, grief, philosophy, my father who passed away. It was rather masculine and abstract. Then, after becoming a mother, I felt a kind of rebirth in myself as well, a newly gained freedom, creativity, playfulness. So it all became about living matter, organic structures, infused with more humor and experimentation. Out of this body of work, the other series, Cadavre Exquis and Modern Alchemy were born. There’s a kind of energetic life force, EROS, that grew into this work.

VS: That’s a great way of looking at my work, I like that!

VS: Hard question. I’m not great at describing my visual language with words. I feel that many of my pictures show the outside of inner transformation and process. The very private, inner world shines through on the outside. We can see it, but it is also trying to hide as it is so vulnerable.

VS: I’ve never thought of photography as a way to just document the visible, or to transport an objective view. It was always a magical medium in my eyes, one that connects the visible world with the magical realm of dreams, thoughts, feelings, but also concepts like time, space, death, the universe.

VS: I’ve always been drawn to the idea of objects as symbols, animism, mythology. Ordinary objects can become meaningful or receive new meaning in a new context. When stripped from their usual function, they become new sculptural entities, and suddenly we look at them with fresh eyes – a milk bottle can become an extension of a body, and suddenly there it is: it transformed into an arm. It’s our brain that will always seek for the human.

VS: Oh, I would guess so… and I relate to that, although voyeurism implies a kind of secrecy, while I try to look at the world with the eyes of a child: in wonder, always curious, eager to learn, non-judgmental.

VS: Keep on moving!