Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1971, Vivian van Blerk has lived and worked in Paris since 1997. His photographs are fictions which unfold in parallel worlds very close to our own. Vivian employs diverse methods. Sometimes he poses actors or arranges found objects before the camera. 

To make other images he constructs, sculpts, models and paints. Collage, montage, alternative printing techniques and retouched negatives enrich his photographic universe.

Vivian's curious worlds offer coherent narratives, stories which unite, harmonize and complete the fragmented cultural inheritence he received from Europe under African skies. Since 2017, he makes ceramics too.

I began making ceramics in Lebanon in 2017. Temporary constructions for photographs become finished pieces. Even as durable sculptures , the fictions created remain sealed beneath the brilliant screen of ceramic glaze and remain mysterious, silent and removed from us in time and in space and scale, unattainable like worlds seen through photographs.

Vivian van Blerk

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For an overview of the available works click HERE

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