Lin May Saeed
∗1973, Germany
† 2023, Berlin
Born in 1973 into a German-Jewish family on her mother’s side and an Iraqi father, Lin May Saeed dedicated her research to empathy with the animal world, to overcoming the conflict between human beings and other species—and, by extension, to reducing society’s impact on environmental equilibria—imagining autopian future of coexistence, freed from the principles of exploitation and abuse.An activist for the defense of animals, in her “works of hope”—as she herself would call them—the artist does not resort to the depiction of suffering nor to the overt denunciation of human behavior, largely drawing on images of friendship and spaces of encounter and reconciliation between different species. A distinctive feature of her research is the absence of moral judgement and an attitude of empathy that permeates her delicate works. Her practice ranges from sculpture to bas-relief, from drawing to scored paper, and focuses on the production of works populated by animals of different geographical origins and human figures taken from stories, fables and myths from ancient Mesopotamia—such as the epic of Gilgamesh—or from the Christian and Islamic tradition, like the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Drawing inspiration from these sources, Lin May Saeed creates cross-cultural and cross-species narratives, embarking on time travel through history to project towards an alternative common future.The approach that accompanied her artistic research questions the direction humanity took after separating from animals, beginning to perceive them as other than us, inferior, something that can therefore be exploited and mistreated. And her work was always aimed at instilling in people a new sensitivity and awareness that would allow them to establish a peaceful and respectful relationship with other living creatures, thus creating a sort of new iconography of interspecies solidarity.The medium of choice for the creation of her sculptures and bas-reliefs is polystyrene, which the artist discovered during her university studies and which she never abandoned, always making use of found or leftover scraps from construction sites. Aware that the main component of polystyrene is derived from petroleum, May Saeed firmly believed this material could reveal something about the present and human fallibility, while appreciating its characteristics of lightness and manageability that allowed her to work entirely independently even on large-scale projects.Her reliefs and sculptural groups in the exhibition are made of polystyrene. Relief as an artistic medium plays a key role in Lin May Saeed’s practice: it runs through all her work, coupled both with her sculpture and painting. In her reliefs, animals are often the protagonists of the scene, or share spaces with humans in moments of rediscovered conviviality. The artist also worked with paper, creating large- format drawings and scorings akin to murals that Saeed called ‘silhouettes’, referencing the German director Lotte Reiniger, who created animated films with backlit shaped paper. Saeed herself uses transparent paper of various colours and black cardboard for her large-format backlit ‘murals’. Lastly, Saeed worked with iron, as when used to produce her series of Gates: large iron doors, of which most depict the moment animals are freed by activists committed to the defence of animal rights.As part of the ninth edition of the Biennale Gherdëina and in connection with the project Thinking Like a Mountain curated by GAMeC under the artistic direction ofLorenzo Giusti, the Lin May Saeed retrospective is being presented simultaneously in Bergamo and Ortisei, with an exhibition in two venues providing a comprehensive overview of the work of the artist who passed away in 2023.
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