The MIT Listing Visible Arts Middle is happy to announce “Listing Tasks 32: Elif Saydam”, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in america. That includes a collection of materially creative work—together with wax-dyed canvases and work on sponges and safety mirrors—the exhibition displays Saydam’s ongoing exploration of social hierarchies, ornamental aesthetics, and the on a regular basis textures of city existence. By combining cast-off materials with overtly ornamental embellishment, Saydam blurs the road between ornamentation and performance, critique and celebration. “Listing Tasks 32” will probably be on view on the Listing Middle June 5 – August 31, 2025.
Saydam engages in an expanded portray observe that comes with components of ornamentation, humor, and socio-political critique. Their work attracts from traditions equivalent to miniature portray and illuminated manuscripts whereas foregrounding modern metropolitan websites—significantly the späti, Berlin’s ubiquitous late-night comfort shops. In these areas, precarious populations intermingle with gentrifying forces, creating dynamic pockets of resistance to the homogenization of cities.
“Elif Saydam’s work conceives portray as a website for projection of fantasy: not solely the fantasies of energy and historical past which have traditionally preoccupied with medium, however the sorts of mundane romance and political longing that we encounter in each day life,” says Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant. “We’re thrilled to be bringing their work to audiences in Boston and past of their first U.S. solo present.”
For “Listing Tasks 32”, Saydam will current 4 giant multi-panel work that make use of the repetitive geometric motif of the brick. Of their work, the brick is an open-ended determine that signifies potentialities of each isolation and connection, blockage and porousness. Their references vary from artwork historic figures like Martin Wong and Philip Guston, to histories of the brick in postcolonial and vernacular structure globally. All of those work have been partially made utilizing wax dying, also referred to as batik—a way that accompanied commerce routes from Southeast Asia to the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and West Africa. And moderately than a single stretched canvas, some have quilted and sewn items of cloth as their help, the results of a labor-intensive English paper piecing method Saydam makes use of.
In these work—as in a lot of Saydam’s work—historic and materials inquiries are layered with moments of decoration, vulnerability, and humor. In Beusselstrasse 17 10553 Alt Moabit (2022–23), as an example, a stark grid of cinder blocks is overlaid with photographic transfers of doorknobs from Saydam’s residence constructing in Berlin. THIS TENDER THAT RENT (2022–23) is freshly adorned with graffiti-like gold hearts each time it’s exhibited; these spray-painted thrives bleed off the canvas onto the encompassing wall.
Saydam’s bigger brick-motif works are joined by new works from their security-mirror sequence, which recontextualizes the reflective medium sometimes used for anti-shoplifting surveillance in retail settings. A few of these works are painted with a latticed star sample, referencing geometric ornamentations that recur in Islamic structure, whereas others characteristic textures drawn from in style materials tradition, equivalent to Eighties stickers and plastic faux-ceramic souvenirs. These works have been put in at each customary image top and close to the ceiling, reflecting the uneasy interaction between visibility, energy, and client tradition. Saydam may also current a small portray on a kitchen sponge—consultant of their longstanding observe of adorning on a regular basis objects and scenes with meticulously painted decoration.
at MIT Listing Visible Arts Middle, Cambridge, MA
till January 12, 2025
