The artist Vivienne Sassen and the curator Clothilde Morette will look back on Vivienne's career over the past 30 years. In their open dialogue, they will touch on various topics, such as her beginnings as a photographer, her work between art & fashion, and other aspects of her personal life that have influenced her works, as well as her work in Japan.
Established in 2004, Birdhead—the Shanghai-based duo that consists of Song Tao (b. 1979) and Ji Weiyu (b. 1980)—initially gained renown for their expansive photographic chronicles of their city’s ongoing regeneration. Over the course of two decades, they have continued to push photography to rhapsodize, critique, and celebrate the world that has come to exist around them. If their early works were about cataloguing a rapid and all-consuming process of urbanization, their more recent creation has, in keeping with KYOTOGRAPHIE’s 2024 theme, returned to the “Source” of the photographic medium, specifically its relationship to its fundamental elements of light and time. By testing the limits of traditional photographic tools and practices, they find a precarious balance between representation and abstraction.
Clothilde Morette (Curator of MEP [Maison Européenne de la Photographie])
Clothilde Morette is Artistic Director of MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie), Paris.
Her responsibilities include oversight of the exhibition and events programmes, as well as curatorial direction of The Studio: MEP’s exhibition space dedicated to emerging talent. Recent projects at MEP have included curating the major retrospective of artist Samuel Fosso; Rineke Dijkstra’s exhibition I See You; and Viviane Sassen’s acclaimed solo show Phosphor: Art and Fashion, which will tour internationally. She is currently working on a major thematic show at MEP about film, photography and ecology. Clothilde Morette also practices independently as both critic and curator, with research interest in relations between literary narratives and both historic and contemporary art. She is a founding editor of the forthcoming magazine LEONORA, which explores affinities between the short stories of Leonora Carrington and contemporary artistic practice.
