Collezione Maramotti unveils Viviane Sassen’s visual requiem for the human form

Viviane Sassen unveils her most comprehensive solo exhibition in Italy to date, This Body Made of Stardust, on view at Collezione Maramotti from April 27th to July 27th, 2025. Presented as part of the Fotografia Europea festival, the show features over fifty photographs and a video created between 2005 and 2025, including new works made specifically for the exhibition. Curated by the artist herself, the exhibition revolves around the theme of memento mori, evoking life’s richness and inevitable fragility.

Rather than following a linear narrative, the works unfold as visual fragments—abstracted bodies, landscapes, and organic forms interwoven into a surreal and dreamlike universe. In one striking photograph, two figures clutch a large palm frond, transforming an everyday gesture into a ritual of intimacy and loss. Another image offers faceless, sculptural bodies wrapped in cloth and cradled by the earth, blurring the line between flesh and stone, life and decay.

Sassen draws inspiration from sculpture, fashion, and design, referring to herself as a sculptor of shadow and emotion. Her layered images—often infused with paint, ink, or collage—play with perception and ambiguity, revealing what lies beneath the surface. The exhibition also enters into dialogue with selected works from the Collezione Maramotti, including sculptures by Evgeny Antufiev and TARWUK.

Through these compositions, Sassen invites viewers to contemplate not just mortality, but transformation, love, and the sublime. As the title suggests, we are reminded that even in death, we remain connected to the cosmos—made not simply of dust, but of stardust.