Visit the Netherlands Photo Museum until 1st June 2014 to discover Viviane Sassen’s unique photography project UMBRA. Sassen has made a series of new work in which she explores her quintessential play with shadows. This series is expanded with previously unseen images from her archives. UMBRA (Latin for ‘shadow’) is presented as one big spacial installation.

Sassen is a fashion and autonomous photographer who gained fame with vibrant photos in which form and content meet abstraction. Colours are contrasted with deep shadows that give existing forms new, abstruse contours. The human body and its positioning are essential, yet classical, themes in her work. Her play with realism and abstraction, on the other hand, is surprisingly contemporary and confuses our gaze by offering multiple perspectives.

UMBRA shows the autonomous work of Sassen in a kaleidoscopic exhibition in which shadow is a metaphor for the human psyche. Fears and desires, but also phantasy and illusion, intrigue and stimulate the audience. The experience is enhanced by creating light-dark contrasts in the space, much like Sassen does in her photography. She also uses video projection and mirrors to render the realism and abstraction in her work both spectacular as poetic.

UMBRA gives space to artistic experiment within photography and aims to create new angles in the moving borders of documentary photography.