Fellow
Elif Saydam
Through an expanded painting practice, Elif Saydam (b. 1985, CA) uses the language of ornamentation and decoration to rearrange systems of valuation and emphasis. Recent solo exhibitions include List Projects 32 at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (2025); RAUS at Franz Kaka, Toronto, CA (2025); and Hospitality at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, CA (2024), with group presentations including A Crack We Sprout Through at SANATORIUM, Istanbul, TR (2024); Die Wissen at nGbK neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin, DE and TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, AT (both 2023); and Lose Enden at Kunsthalle Bern, CH (2021). Saydam, a graduate of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, lives and works between Berlin, DE and Izmir, TR. In 2024/25, Saydam spent a year in New York City on a residency fellowship from the Hessische Kulturstiftung.
Hessische Kulturstiftung (HKST) After spending a year at the foundation’s studio in New York City, you’ve recently returned to Berlin—it’s great that we have the opportunity to speak with you today! Before your residency began, you mentioned that you’re interested in “social spaces where we construct resonance with one another, or in the very least, where everyone can feel equally strange”. Did you discover such spaces in New York?
Elif Saydam I first encountered this phrase about feeling “equally strange” during an ideological argument about inclusivity, at a collective art space I helped start in Berlin. At the time, it really rubbed me the wrong way! There are many odds against us which determine how only *some* people are made to feel strange or out of place in societies, and it’s a crucial step to recognize this. But to the credit of the phrase, I think it’s really compelling to frame a utopia as an ambivalent space where the focus is on everyone feeling out of place together, instead of ordinary or “normal.” This latter is the essence of gentrification: erasing any urban difference which can cause tension, or separating it into neat areas where one knows what to expect. I think such a utopia – where things that are chaotic, vibrant and uncomfortable can be held together – is only experienced in brief and fleeting glimmers, either through our fantasies or constructed myths of the city. Public space is so controlled and surveilled, and nowadays this occurs more and more in our private lives as well. We are kept alienated from one another in new and horrifying ways.
In his long-form non-fiction essay Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the American science-fiction writer Samuel Delany chronicles gentrification in Midtown, New York, and what he refers to as the “Disneyfication” of Times Square in the 90s. This area of town was once both very lively and sketchy – a cruising site for what Delany refers to as “cross-class contact” through the mutual pursuit of desire. I think this term “cross-class contact” is linked to the idea of resonance: a brief and meaningful moment of overlapping connection driven by a shared presence and longing, before we break apart again.
During my time in New York, Midtown was fascinating to me, with the clash of tiktokers, tourists, delivery drivers, diamond dealers… The dissonance brings resonance, and I think resonance relies on this tension we spoke of before. Decades beyond the gentrification Delany speaks of, and post-post-Disneyfication, the area felt paradoxically resistant to and at the mercy of change, as if going full circle or trapped in a feedback loop. This is a kind of haunting, like a spirit unable to pass to the next realm, especially when one considers the loss of people who are systematically erased from social spaces. I realized the complexity of Midtown after trips there to buy specialised materials, like goldleaf; you never know what is on the 22nd floor of this or that building, what is behind this or that door. Or what circumstances will bring you together.
HKST Would you say that your art creates spaces of resonance—spaces that enable encounters?
Saydam It’s always surprising what associations others will have when encountering my work, and I think the unpredictability of interpretation is key in constructing meaning together. My interest in the lives of other people is what compels me to overload my paintings with conflicting signs, symbols, and codes which act like unique triggers for each person based on their memory bank. Although I have my own agenda, I won’t deny or affirm any singular reading.
A favourite encounter is when someone saw one of my devotional miniature paintings of Berlin Spätkaufs, Zu spät (II). They approached me to say that they once sang Karaoke in that exact shop with the owner, who regularly performs songs with random customers; this evocation was particularly meaningful to that person as it was the Covid lockdown, a period where it was increasingly difficult to connect. And then this meaningfulness intersected with my life as well, to be carried forward into new work.
HKST Your work oscillates between Islamic ornamental traditions and Western European art history. To what extent does your personal background—your Turkish roots, as well as your lived experiences in Canada, Germany, and most recently the U.S.—shape your aesthetic and conceptual approach?
Saydam I don’t consider subjective experience as content for my work, but rather as a tool to shape my formal strategies to address the construction of value in art. So in that way, my background has shaped my approach profoundly. I moved frequently as a child, so I didn’t establish an attachment to any single community, nor did I feel confident I could embody an “authentic” cultural role, although I was sentimentally attached to both my homeland and my diasporic position. This variability also fostered a tendency to be an observer as opposed to a participant, which I think is linked to how we construct the role of the painter as a kind of lonely scribe, creating a record of the world around them. I want to embody that role, but tongue in cheek, since the world I actually want to record cannot exist under the conditions we have.
“Oscillate” is a great verb to describe paintings, which are normally proscribed as static objects. I also think that different mediums and approaches have more in common than we like to admit, across the spectrum of artistic hierarchies. In Turkish, the word “sanat” means art, but also skill or craft. This is an interesting and deliberate conflation, since Turkish is typically a very precise and expressive language. I try to bring this broader definition into my studio. Recently for my exhibition RAUS in Toronto, I decided to handweave all the linen for my canvases. I made simple still-life paintings, and the linen was not so different from what one would buy in the shop, but I wove a red thread directly into the canvas, and this gesture embedded a layer of labor into the work that altered its meaning. The preciousness of each piece “oscillated” between the surface and the painting ground below. In certain geographies, this approach of not differentiating between art or craft has legitimacy in its own right, but working in Central Europe it often has to be explained, even though this was once historically the case here, too. But this resistance can be useful for generating productive conversations around aesthetic hierarchies, and how they relate to other social structures as well.
HKST Even though you mostly refrain from depicting bodies, your works still convey a sense of corporeality—through materials, traces, and fragments. Is this subtle form of bodily presence a deliberate strategy to represent identity? Perhaps even a means to defy reductive ascriptions?
Saydam To put it simply, identification is important insofar as our experiences coming out of that determine our proximity to power and violence. I think this must always be kept in mind, while resisting the temptation to just settle for representation, which brings the danger of identity becoming a trope without any of the liberatory outcomes we desperately need. As you astutely observe, there is a preoccupation in my work with figuration, but more by painting the accessories of an absent figure, through literal adornment like gold and pattern. This iconoclasm opens up many other ways to describe or indicate a presence, like through language or poetry, and decoration, which is a form of language too. I try to approach “embellish” as a verb with two definitions: “To make something more attractive by the addition of decorative details” and “To make a statement more interesting by adding extra details that are often untrue.” In this way, I remain an unreliable narrator. Ideally, the studio is a place where I can leave reductive ascriptions at the door – and if I’m lucky, even forget that I have a body to begin with!
HKST You engage with Camp, an aesthetic concept commonly linked to queer culture, artificiality, exaggeration, theatricality, and irony. You once said that such a definition belies the complexity of Camp. How so?
Saydam Speaking about Camp is difficult, as we are hesitant to reify something that in its heart is anti-establishment, and based on meaningful social codes. But the strict association of Camp with frivolity, exaggeration, and artifice feels esoteric to me, and belies its complexity as a formal strategy within a political framework. For me the essence of Camp is the rigorous, die-hard commitment to building and maintaining a fantasy through performativity, even if that fantasy fails from the start. I take this approach with my paintings by embellishing the surface of ridiculous objects – kitchen sponges, toilet stall doors – with highly detailed, devotional strokes. Besides the obvious humor in that, or the references to gender and labour, it’s a way to take the art of being unserious very, very seriously. I invite the viewer to look at the work on my terms. Camp is concerned with being convincing, but only for a moment, and that moment is very fragile but powerful. I think, if anything, that’s what it’s all about. This moment is a form of the resonance we have spoken about; it’s brief, but it can also stretch out. It has longevity. And it shows us how Camp can be foundational as a survival strategy in an increasingly hostile world, and how that has operated not just for queer communities, but immigrants as well, who exaggerate heritage in a stylized performance of culture. This artifice in relation to heritage can speak volumes about how limited senses of belonging or inclusion are constructed, but also how these limitations can be defied, ridiculed, or overcome.
HKST Can you pinpoint any constants that continue to define your work to this day—and possibly beyond?
Saydam Our world can feel very heavy, and as discussed, I try to address that in my own way, by exploring the transgressive potential of decoration to raise pressing questions about contemporary society. But what I feel is so important to maintain throughout a practice is a relationship to joy and pleasure – this is what can enable a life’s work. That, and attention to detail, of course.
