Where Eyes Rest is the third solo exhibition of Stéphanie Saadé, a Lebanese Contemporary artist who was born in 1983. Her works are exhibited at Grey Noise in Dubai from September 19, 2022 until November 3, 2022.
In this exhibition, Stéphanie Saadé explores various themes such as memory and the individual experience of time, scale and place. She places the objects loosely, giving them a vague network of references. Most often Saadé uses personal objects, which she mutates or changes in shapes or sizes in order to give them different meanings. Wooden toys, her old school notebooks, worn curtains, blankets – all those objects are drawn from her past and present surroundings and are given new value and meaning.
Saade uses her individual experience of time and place to explore the relationship between the intimate and the universal. One of the objects on the exhibition is a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, sent on September 2, 2022 from Paris, where the artist currently resides, to her own address with the words: “Today I felt like a change in perspective”. Simple postcard, with her thought, written in a moment of hesitation, in the context of the exhibition takes another meaning, becomes a metaphor, shifting the perspective of the viewers.
Some works, such as Re-Enactment FR/ Eiffel Tower (2022), where an Eiffel tower presented dismantled and got unexpected erotic connotation are drawn from the artist’s current life in Paris. Other objects deal with the nature of memory and time, reflect the past periods of childhood and teenagehood and connect those periods together. In the installation Stéphanie Saadé (2022), covers and pages of schoolbooks with the artist’s name handwritten on it by her mother or herself become art objects.
“The work of Stéphanie Saadé develops a language of suggestion, playing with poetics and metaphor. She shares clues, signs, images and occasionally silent trails with us, which interact like the words of a single sentence. It is for the viewer to decipher them, as would an archaeologist faced with traces, fossils and fragments. This enigmatic quality often stems from the artist’s own experience. In her oeuvre, personal experience is invoked exclusively as a universal subject,” says Caroline Cros.
Stéphanie Saadé’s works have been exhibited in numerous key galleries and museums such as Kunsthaus Pasquart. She has been featured in articles for Art Viewer, ArtDaily and Art Asia Pacific. The most recent article is Stéphanie Saadé: Building a Home with Time / Kunsthaus Pasquart written for VernissageTV in February 2022.
To learn more, please visit the official website of the Grey Noise gallery.
You may also be interested in visiting Shamma Al Amri’s exhibition “So to Speak”.
