“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” – Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977).
This profound quote by Susan Sontag lays the foundation for This Body Made of Stardust, a deeply evocative new exhibition by Viviane Sassen, on view at Collezione Maramotti from 27 April to 27 July 2025. Part of the Fotografia Europea festival’s twentieth edition, the show is the artist’s most extensive presentation in Italy to date. Comprising more than 50 photographs and a video spanning two decades of practice, this self-curated body of work traces a visual constellation of life, decay, memory and desire.
Sassen, whose work Aesthetica has long championed for its visceral tactility and hallucinatory elegance, continues to forge her unique visual lexicon – part sculpture, part dream. In projects such as Umbra and Lexicon, Sassen does not merely photograph bodies; she transforms them into otherworldly fragments of thought, desire and dissolution. In This Body Made of Stardust, her practice finds new resonance in the memento mori – a concept that historically reminds us of our own mortality, yet here is reimagined as something generative, even tender.
The images float between the sensual and the surreal. Disjointed limbs emerge from fields of colour; faceless bodies lie cloaked in shadows or submerged in water; fungi, palms and tree trunks become sentinels of life and loss. These are not fixed meanings but mutable impressions – shards of memory and myth refracted through Sassen’s lens. “I try to grant structure to chaos,” she says, echoing a poetic impulse to turn transience into form. The result is not a simple lament for what is lost, but a celebration of the transformative nature of living and dying.
This sense of fluid identity – of being in-between – places Sassen in kinship with other contemporary visionaries. Artists like Zanele Muholi and Viviane’s longtime peer, Lorna Simpson, explore similar terrain: the fragmentation of the body, the abstraction of form, and the multiplicity of presence. However, Sassen’s work, particularly in this exhibition, leans into ambiguity. It is less concerned with narrative and more with sensation. Much like the visual poetry of fellow Aesthetica favourite Elizaveta Porodina, there is a palpable desire to push beyond the frame, to access something primal and unnameable.
And yet, this is no escapist reverie. This Body Made of Stardust is grounded – literally – in the materials of earth, dust, water and light. Many of the images evoke rituals of burial and rebirth. Palm fronds become protective cloaks; tree trunks stand like ancient monuments; bodies fold into soil and sea. In this, the exhibition forms an organic dialogue with sculptural works from the Collezione Maramotti – by Evgeny Antufiev, Kaarina Kaikkonen, TARWUK, and Fabrizio Prevedello – artists whose own practices blur the boundaries between flesh and form, vulnerability and permanence.
One of the exhibition’s strengths lies in its resistance to linearity. Sassen constructs a non-narrative structure of associative juxtapositions – where each photograph, no matter how abstract, becomes a node in a larger constellation. Some of these images draw from earlier series, while others have been made specifically for the show, reflecting her evolving relationship with photography and time. She continues to work across mediums – introducing collage, painting and ink – bringing a three-dimensional tactility to her two-dimensional practice. “I see myself as a sculptor,” she has said, and indeed, there is something of the sculptor’s discipline in how she shapes light and shadow into solid, almost tangible forms.
What sets this exhibition apart, and what makes it such a vital offering in the landscape of contemporary photography, is its depth of introspection. As the digital age continues to favour immediacy, clarity and categorisation, This Body Made of Stardust resists. It asks us to linger. To look again. To find meaning not in certainty, but in nuance. In this way, Sassen’s work aligns with the ethos of Aesthetica Magazine: to celebrate ambiguity, to honour complexity and to offer space for reflection.
As the Fotografia Europea festival considers what it means to be 20 – on the threshold of maturity, looking back as much as forward – Sassen reminds us that we are always in a state of transformation. Her images offer no answers, but they are rich with questions. What do we leave behind? What do we carry? What do we become?
This Body Made of Stardust transcends the expected. It challenges us not only to see, but to embrace our own fragility, as part of a greater cycle of creation and decay. In Sassen’s hands, photography is not a tool of documentation, but of alchemy. It is a mirror, a portal and a song. It is the quiet recognition that though we are dust, we are also light. We are, after all, made of stars.
This Body Made of Stardust is at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, from 27 April – 27 July.
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
1. Viviane Sassen, Phoenix / Revisited, (2009 – 2023). Posca paint on c-print 100 x 137,5 cm. © Viviane Sassen Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Amsterdam).
2. Viviane Sassen, Inhale, (2011). C-print 50 x 40 cm. © Viviane Sassen. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Amsterdam).
3. Viviane Sassen, Belladonna, (2010). C-print 100 x 125 cm. © Viviane Sassen. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Amsterdam).
4. Viviane Sassen, Ivy (2010). C-print 50 x 40 cm. © Viviane Sassen. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Amsterdam).
