STÉPHANIE SAADÉ Building a Home with Time

Stéphanie Saadé (*1983, Lebanon) deals in her work with themes such as memory and the individual experience of time, scale and references to place. She subtly influences existing objects with quiet artistic interventions and places them in a loose network of references. They function as personal objets trouvés that do not speak language but think it. The artist explores the nature of memory, historicity or the condition humaine, using transposition, displacement and metaphor to explore the relationship between the intimate and the universal.

The exhibition brings together new and existing works, including sculptures, fabric works, videos, works in glass and a video game, through which the artist develops different narratives around the theme of home. Building a Home with Time speaks to the slow process of forming a place, and at the same time the evolution and constitution of being, both of which are tied to each other and inseparable from the passage of time. Often her works place her personal life in scale with a part of completed history, but are also expanded by current events — such as the recent popular uprising, the devaluation of the Lebanese pound, hyperinflation, a global pandemic and a deadly explosion — which link the past and the present.