About Marie-José Jongerius
Marie-José Jongerius is a photographer and researcher, based in Amsterdam. In her landscape pictures she looks for boundaries, limits and edges between nature and the manmade world. Where are the interfaces between the organic and the artificial world, and do they fail or succeed? Jongerius tells stories about mankind, not by making pictures of us, but pictures of the traces we leave behind us. She observes geography with an attentive eye for those singular details that make up our daily lives and asks the viewer to consider where we live and how we relate to our respective environments. Her work is not only visual, but also the result of long periods of investigation to confront popular belief and clichés to reality.
About Viviane Sassen
Sassen was born in 1972 in Amsterdam, and lives there. She studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Ateliers Arnhem.
She’s an internationally renowned fashion photographer and visual artist. Characteristic for her photos is her use of intense colors, combined with strong contrasts between bright light and dark shadows. Her work was influenced by her childhood in Kenya, where she lived from her second to fifth year. She works on behalf of major fashion brands such as Miu Miu, Stella McCartney, Adidas and Louis Vuitton. In her fashion photography, models pose in acrobatic poses; only fragments of their bodies are visible. People disappear in the shadows or their bodies are intertwined, creating geometric shapes that make her work looking very abstract.
Solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at many different institutions all of over the world. Sassen was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York’s Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. In 2015 she was awarded the David Octavius Hill Medal from the German Photography Academy, and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her exhibition Umbra. She has also received numerous awards for her publications.
About Martine Stig
Photography itself is the locus of Martine Stig’s work. The voyeuristic act: photography (verb) and the autonomic product: photo (noun). Whilst using the medium she researches it’s role in the perception of reality. She employs cliché – a box of tricks that evolved with the profession itself – to manipulate a viewers’ viewing experience.
Cultural framing interest her and how visual truths prove to be obverse. She’s also interested in the universal need to take and cherish pictures of loved ones.
Stig has a teaching and research position at The Master Institute, Den Bosch. She is also the co-founder of Radical Reversibility, a practice and research-based art cooperative open to like-minded members who wish to publish and/or produce work within the RR field of research. Radical Reversiblity was founded by Martine Stig, artist duo Hiryczuk/ Van Oevelen, and independent curator Frank van der Stok.
