Hospitality (2024–2025) uses a deceptively modest material: laminated plastic sheets suspended together with metal binder rings. These curtain-like works hang in layered sequences, playing with transparency, surface and image. Here, interior space is both an invitation and a site of denial, a place for welcoming as well as for excluding.
Restaged and expanded for the biennial in a moment of prosecution and suppression of public expression, with widespread rhetoric framing queer communities as a threat to traditional conceptions of the family, the work has local resonances through its incorporation of Turkish folk phrases, such as on para etmez (‘not worth ten pennies’) and beş para etmez (‘not worth five pennies’), as well as its invocation of lyrics from a song by Âşık Veysel: ‘Your beauty isn’t worth a penny / if it weren’t for my love.’ The artist raises vital questions about belonging, desire, disrepair and the future of minoritarian societies in Türkiye, while contemplating what goes on behind closed doors.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Elif Saydam (b. 1985, Calgary) currently lives and works between Berlin and Izmir. They deploy the language of ornamentation and decoration to rearrange systems of valuation and emphasis through an expanded painting practice. Solo exhibitions include List Projects 32 at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2025); RAUS at Franz Kaka, Toronto (2025); Hospitality at Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (2024). Group exhibitions include A Crack We Sprout Through at SANATORIUM, Istanbul (2024); die Wissen at nGbK, Berlin, and TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol (2023); Lose Enden, Kunsthalle Bern (2021).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Elif Saydam (b. 1985)
Hospitality, 2024–
1000 laminated inkjet prints, nickel coated rings
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist, Tanya Leighton and Franz Kaka Gallery
Elif Saydam (b. 1985)
On para (A penny), 2025
23k gold, Japanese tinted silver, inkjet transfer and oil on linen
28 × 21.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton
Elif Saydam (b. 1985)
Herkese çay (Tea for all), 2025
23k gold, inkjet transfer and oil on linen
28 × 21.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton
