Elif Saydam, Hospitality, 2024. Inkjet prints. Courtesy the artist and Franz Kaka.
Elif Saydam: Hospitality
OCT 18 – DEC 14 2024
Opening Reception
OCT 17 / 7 – 9PM
Audain Gallery
Elif Saydam’s multi-dimensional painting practice examines the ideological forces that scaffold and shape aesthetic taste. Drawing on histories of ornamentation outside the European canon, Saydam challenges gendered, classist, and Orientalist assumptions about decoration—which are rife with connotations of frivolity, femininity, and excess—to entangle traditional miniature painting techniques with queer iconography, camp, and references to contemporary popular culture.
The anchor point in Hospitality, an exhibition of entirely new work, is a sequence of three highly detailed paintings. Two of these are realized on reclaimed lavatory-stall doors and the third is rendered, trompe l’oeil style, on linen. The doors’ origins in the 1920s is portentous for Saydam, as it was a period when carefree consumption throughout the West, masquerading as “freedom,” obscured an ominous slide into fascism. One hundred years later, the artist observes, and our current geopolitical climate feels unsettlingly similar. Saydam’s sumptuous and labour-intensive surface embellishment confounds the vulgarity of the doors’ original purpose as toilet dividers, and at the same time offers a playful nod to more transgressive acts taking place behind semi-closed doors, such as cruising, crying, or slacking off.
Installed three in a row in the gallery, the doors also reference the long-running American television game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” where contestants are asked to choose between a trio of closed doors. Behind one lies a highly covetable reward (“a new car!”), while the other two conceal worthless booby prizes (“you’ve won jewelry made of bacon!”). Like the painted doors themselves (two of them “real,” and the third a “fake”) the contestants’ conundrum to select the correct door highlights for Saydam what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has described as “cruel optimism,” the societal condition that systematically ensures our desires actually obstruct our ability to thrive. As Berlant describes, “people have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives ‘add up to something.’” Here, however, it is unclear which threshold holds the most promise. As is often the case in Saydam’s work, exuberant facades overlay troubled questions about contemporary society, historical violence, and collective grief.
The door is a deeply ambivalent symbol for Saydam, suggesting both promised happiness and its impossibility, hospitality (when open) and hostility (when closed). Alongside the painted doors and a series of smaller works, Saydam presents an installation of laminated, transparent prints as a spatial interruption, suspended throughout the space to create rooms, hallways, and liminal thresholds. Through this repetition, a door can suggest an escape route, whether real or imagined, and therefore the possibility of an otherwise life. Doors can also be approached as devices through which to consider the complex web of relations between hosts and guests, a condition especially present in this exhibition’s context upon unceded and ancestral Indigenous territories of the Northwest Coast, as well as, more broadly, within global discourses around settler-colonialism today.
Saydam’s installation of floral wreaths in the gallery’s Hastings Street windows further extends their inquiry into the rich entanglement of social decorum with decoration. This cultural form, referred to as çelenk in Turkish, تاجِ گُل in Farsi and 花环 in Chinese, is familiar to many diasporic communities the world over. While typically serving as markers of celebration, accomplishment, and well-wishing (commonly gifted at wedding ceremonies or the launch of a new business), the same flower arrangements are also exchanged in a funeral context, to mourn and commemorate the dead. Whether circular, teardrop- or heart-shaped, arranged with commonplace or exotic flora, festooned with ribbon banners, and trimmed with cheap organza or foil, their near infinite variation is for Saydam an example of the astounding agility of ornamentation. Traveling across time and space, carrying sometimes resolutely specific cultural expressions but simultaneously adapting to new contexts as it moves, the decorative remains a powerful vehicle of community resilience, and a jubilant declaration of survival.
A parallel publication, with texts by Sanabel Abdelrahman, Onur Çimen, and José Segebre, illustrations by graphic artist Ahmad Nabil, designed by Rosen Eveleigh and co-published with Publication Studio Vancouver, will be launched at the close of the exhibition.
Organized by SFU Galleries, with generous support from Franz Kaka, Toronto.
Through an expanded painting practice, Turkish-Canadian artist Elif Saydam uses the language of ornamentation and decoration to rearrange systems of valuation and emphasis. Recent solo and group exhibitions include A Crack We Sprout Through at SANATORIUM (Istanbul); it's not you it's me at Sentiment (Zürich); Stealth at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich); Half Life at Franz Kaka (Toronto); Eviction Notice at Oakville Galleries Gairloch Gardens (Ontario); Cleaning up the Neighborhood at All Stars (Lausanne); Lose Enden at Kunsthalle Bern (Bern); F*rgiveness at Tanya Leighton (Berlin); and ...schläft sich durch at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg). Saydam's first monograph TWO CENTS was published in 2022 with Mousse Publishing (Italy) and they frequently collaborate on interdisciplinary text-based projects with other artists and writers. Saydam is the recipient of the Hessische Kulturstiftung Atelier Stipendium in New York City for 2024/25, where they are researching Camp aesthetics as an emancipatory tool for diasporic survival and political imagination. Saydam lives and works in Berlin.