SOLD OUT / Sanne Peper - Fireworks (Tokyo), 2007
SOLD OUT
C-print
Signed, titled, dated and numbered on a label
70 x 50 cm/beeldmaat 60,5 x 40 cm
Edition of 10
ABOUT THE WORK
In her photographs, Peper moves between aesthetics and engagement, between a romantic escapism and a historical, political and social awareness: ‘History exists by virtue of specific interpretations and projections, and is thus politically, morally and religiously biased.’ In fact, that is precisely what Peper’s work is about: how the (possible) history of a place influences and distorts one’s perception of it.
She describes how her own, personal philosophy influences her trademark visual aesthetic: ‘I believe there's no such thing as truth and that everything we know is just our subjective imagination of what perhaps occurred in some place and time. Everything we think we know about the past, we have learned from physical remnants and artefacts, but especially also from personally coloured testimonies in text or images, whether moving or static. In both their content and form, my photos allude to those images. They are reminiscent of film stills; they seem to be a slice from a larger whole, both visually and in time, as if something happened in the past or is about to happen. They are intermediate images. I have always been interested in the unreal, that which lies beneath the surface: the history and context of a place. Or the locus of a particular history. Although my medium is photography, which in itself carries the connotation of objectivity, I choose subjects that are ambiguous and not easily translated into imagery. That’s how I create space to interpret and project.’
As a visual artist, she creates subjective renderings of a (possible) history of places in urban areas as well as portrayals of the sublime: wonderful but dreadful examples of nature such as the dystopian Trinity site near Los Alamos, the post-apocalyptic area around Chernobyl, the political landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ghost-ridden, “Christ-haunted” landscapes of the Deep South of the United States.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Sanne Peper (b. 1963) lives and works in Amsterdam. She majored in Fine Arts at ArtEZ in Arnhem and in Photography at the AKI in Enschede. Next to her independent work, she has been working for many years as theatre photographer for several companies such as Dood Paard, Oostpool, mightysociety, and Toneelgroep Amsterdam. She also does assignments for cultural clients such as Mediafonds (Amsterdam), Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (The Hague), ArtEZ Fashion Masters (Arnhem), OMA (Rotterdam), Maison Martin Margiela (Paris). She is a guest tutor at the Academy of Architecture (Amsterdam). The work of Sanne Peper was featured in the Foam Pop-In in 2011. Foam Editions made a selection of seven autonomous works of Sanne Peper. These pictures of various metropolitan buildings are not perfectly sharp. This is on purpose: the dim pictures create a reality, but it is also difficult to precisely place and let space for interpretation and the reality of the observe.
Sanne Peper has a fascination for the tension between the (subjective) history of places and events and the visual actuality.
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