‘Jacqueline Hassink – Fitting Rooms’

NL is proud to present the first London solo exhibition by Jacqueline Hassink.

Jacqueline Hassink is a New York-based Dutch artist whose conceptual practice using photography has applied a highly structured approach to turning the lens on phenomena that effectively elaborate the more abstract values beneath the immediate surface of the image. More specifically, Hassink has used photography as a means by which to systematically approach the world of economic power in its infinite guises. 

What at first glance might appear to come from a fine art photography documentary tradition turns out to be something else on closer inspection. Seemingly familiar rooms – such as corporate boardrooms- might act as a gateway to a reflection on the global economic forces inherently manifest within these spaces. Or there are the female ‘spokesmodels’ at car fairs of the ‘Car Girls’ series, again a recognisable image within the mass visual canon. Although Jacqueline Hassink’s interest in such phenomena is specifically how corporate branding and huge multinationals operate on a global scale locally, they naturally also prompt questions about the complex gender politics at work within societies that have supposedly assimilated the victories of Feminism into their economic and industrial structures.

In ‘Fitting Rooms’, Hassink takes a similarly conceptual approach to the luxurious world of high fashion. Given unprecedented access to VIP and haute couture fitting rooms of Parisian couture and luxury fashion maisons, Hassink has turned her camera on the most private of luxury fashion’s spaces. We, the viewers, are invited to voyeuristically enter the inner sanctums of Chanel, Valentino or Ungaro, usually only reserved for the superrich elite that patronise this tiny and exclusive niche at the pinnacle of the international fashion industry. Access, we are certainly granted. But, it is immediately evident that this is not a simple matter of fly-on-the-wall surveillance of places that most of us would never be able to enter; not a tabloid rubberneck gaze.

Like all of Hassink’s work, the images are thoroughly and precisely staged, in this case, as staged as the very environments that she photographs. And, one could even argue, it is more a matter of counter-staging, the photographic equivalent of Brecht’s alienation effect in which the machinery beneath becomes evident. In the framing of the images and their absence of the actual people that might realistically populate them, we are drawn into the image in such a way that encourages a kind of deconstruction of the environment, a thought-provoking examination in which we become acutely aware of the totality of forces, both intentional and implicit, at work in these rooms. It is a process in which, as with much of her other work, Hassink examines the boundaries between public and private spaces.

The photographs encourage our conscious consideration of how each of these prestigious luxury brands has carefully constructed its particular seductive haven that ensures the paying customer of the authenticity and value of the transaction into which she is entering. Taste, style and all of the social values implicit in these cultural concepts fuse together in what might be described as the alchemy of branding, the purest and most essential form of the fusion between what is fundamentally an industrial product and the abstract and emotive forces that drive what is often termed ‘culture’. But we are also encouraged to see another particular layer, that economic matrix at the intersection of commerce, constructions of female gender and social power and prestige.

If all of this gives the impression that Hassink’s work might render these environments ugly or break the magic spell, this would be entirely misleading. On the contrary, the strength of the work is that it deftly manages to balance any sceptical critique with a meditative and quiet rendition of each of these spaces that readily acknowledges their tranquil or sumptuous beauty.

Jacqueline Hassink was born in 1966 in Enschede. She has exhibited internationally in various institutions and commercial galleries including Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; Netherlands Photo Museum, Rotterdam; Gemeente Museum, The Hague; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; International Center of Photorgraphy, New York; Amador Gallery, New York; Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Rencontres Arles, Arles; Three Shadows Art Photography Centre, Beijing; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangdong; Toyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; Galerie Deux, Tokyo and MOCCA, Toronto, amongst others. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including those of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam. She has published ten books of her work with publishers in London (Chris Boot), New York (Aperture) and Basel (Birkhäuser Verlag). Hassink is a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.