ELIF SAYDAM

The protagonists of Elif Saydam’s work are, to date, commonly insects and parasites—the often rejected and deposed members of ecology. In the ‘Hotline’ series (2019), fashioned like tear-off flyers, the artist juxtaposes photographic images—many lifted from pest exterminators’ websites—with motivational slogans such as ‘Come into the light’ and ‘Reach your full potential’. At the bottom of the flyers are numbers to a hotline beginning with ‘555’—digits partially reserved for fictional film and television numbers. Elif Saydam’s ‘Hotline’, with numbers that will never answer, reflects the sardonic humour found across her work.

In various paintings titled Artists, Elif Saydam combines ornamental motifs from a 16th-century Ottoman miniature painting with imagery from modern-day advertising to create layered scenes. Cartoonish cockroaches in Artists (2019) appear against the backdrop of a gold-leafed fountain and a medley of fruits and flowers, replaced with a group of gossiping wasps in Artists (gossip) (2020). In a video for Tanya Leighton, Saydam discusses the differences between bees and wasps, noting that the latter still pollinates, ‘which is maybe what we’re doing’.

Pollination also features in Saydam’s text for her solo exhibition Selfing (2020) at Cologne’s Mélange, in which she describes a future when all winged pollinators have gone extinct and pollination workers are heavily regulated by companies. The act of engineering a sense of the self is scrutinised in two quilts made from denim, each evoking a worker’s uniform (Worker jacket c. future and Worker trousers c. future, 2020). Decorated with stars and flowers, among other motifs, the patchworks suggest an attempt at individuality amidst relentless work.

For the group exhibition Reality (2020) at TROPEZ, Berlin, Elif Saydam developed an online memory game titled Déjà Vu. Consisting of playing cards with images varying between masks, fruits, ice cream cones, doodles, and more, the game encourages the viewer to assign impromptu meanings and narratives to the images—a process that implies experience goes in tandem with perception.

Everybody’s Fool (2020), Saydam’s solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich, merges the European court jester with elements of Ottoman miniature painting. In works such as Fancy Fool (2019), the figure appears surrounded by fruits and greenery, its body seemingly disappearing into or emerging from the floral background.

Elif Saydam lives and works in Berlin.

Elif Saydam Solo Exhibitions include:

Gut feeling, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2020); Stairs and Traffic (with Leonie Nagel), The Tail, Brussels (2020); What me worry, stadium, Berlin (2019); La belle dame sans merci, Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019).

Elif Saydam Group Exhibitions include:

Perhaps A window?, stadium, Berlin (2020); Times in Crisis, Klosterruine, Berlin 2019 Network Error, INOX, Copenhagen (2020); Pressing your face in wet grass, PRIVATEOFFSPACE, Frankfurt am Main (2017).

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020