Viviane Sassen

The book is stamped by Sassen with number 15/50.

Same ISBN for all 4 books in the set.

Same ISBN as Lexicon?

This is not the 2015 2nd edition.

For this artist book, Viviane Sassen collaborates with legendary book designer Irma Boom to offer a fresh and radical vision of the Palace of Versailles.

A storied site of history, opulence, and political power, France's Palace of Versailles has long captured the imagination of both the public and many acclaimed photographers. In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited by Versailles to make a series of photographs throughout its vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours, when the buildings were empty, to wander and photograph the palace's extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette's private correspondence.Venus & Mercury is Versailles as you've never seen the storied locale before. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace's many marble statues, Sassen created hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender and call to mind traditions of Surrealist art and the work of figures such as Hans Bellmer. The book, featuring more than one hundred images, brims with Sassen's surprising, pigment-splashed photomontages that play with vivid color and abstracted forms ' and a group of women, born and raised in the town beyond the palace walls, appears throughout the book, modern-day protagonists photographed within grand palatial chambers.A series of poems by Marjolijn van Heemstra, commissioned by Sassen, allude to histories of intrigue in court society. Conceived and designed by iconic bookmaker Irma Boom, Venus & Mercury is a unique art object with a double-gatefold cover, packaged in a custom-made box, each individually painted by Sassen.

Flamboya is the seminal first monograph by Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen. The book compiles over fifty photographs taken between 2004 and 2008 across various African countries, including Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, and Uganda. The title is inspired by the flamboyant tree, which scatters vibrant red and orange blossoms across sub-Saharan Africa.

The project is deeply informed by Sassen's childhood biography; she lived in Kenya from ages two to five while her father worked at a local hospital. Her return to the continent as an adult sparked a complex artistic exploration of memory, belonging, and foreignness. Rather than presenting a conventional, monolithic Western depiction of Africa, Sassen embraces an ambiguous perspective that oscillates between deep closeness and inescapable distance.

Visually, Flamboya subverts the traditional boundaries of documentary photography by injecting a highly stylized, performative, and fashion-adjacent aesthetic vocabulary. Sassen collaborates intimately with her subjects to construct carefully art-directed tableaux, utilizing harsh, direct equatorial sunlight and deep, graphic shadows. By frequently obscuring the faces of her models through dramatic casting of shade, cropped framings, or contorted body poses, she transforms human figures into striking sculptural forms.

Through its deliberate interplay of saturated colors, textiles, and geometric abstraction, Flamboya actively resists ethnographic voyeurism. The work challenges traditional Western tropes of the "Other," inviting multiple interpretations while offering a powerful meditation on the limitations of sight, knowledge, and power in the history of photography.

Ten signed photographic prints affixed loosely in the book.