Artist: Lin May Saeed
Exhibition title: Djamil
Venue: Lulu, Mexico City
Date: September 30 – November 18, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lulu, Mexico City
Lulu is very proud to present a solo exhibition by the German, Berlin-based sculptor Lin May Saeed.
Lin May Saeed makes sculptures, sculptural reliefs, drawings, works on paper and video. Known to use non-traditional materials, such as and especially styrofoam, Saeed’s work is directly linked to and thematically informed by her interest in animals and her commitment to animal activism. Her work deals with the exploitation of animals, their depiction, liberation, and potentially harmonious relationship with human beings, and the self-seeking meanness of the latter. Saeed’s iconographic frame of reference is rich and varied. It includes Egyptian statuary, Greco-Roman sculpture, and scientific and natural history museum displays, among other things. She is a sculptor in the truest sense of the term. By which is meant that her work critically interrogates what a sculpture can be, both materially and conceptually, and how it relates to three-dimensional representations of orders of knowledge. Generally eschewing noble materials, such as marble and wood, she is drawn to styrofoam precisely because it is an essentially ugly and difficult material, which she seeks to aesthetically redeem, despite and because of its essentially ruinous use of and impact upon nature. Generally speaking, the work becomes especially relevant in our post-enlightenment, anthropocene paradigm, where the relationship between the so-called natural world and humanity is being radically re-evaluated. Apparently naïve and enchanting, her colorful representations of animal life are nevertheless suffused with a scientific understanding of her subject and aim for an identifiable likeness. Hers is a sculpture in which there is virtually no gap between her political convictions and the formal and conceptual considerations of her medium.
For her exhibition at Lulu, Saeed presents an entirely new body of work, which includes reliefs, free-standing sculpture, a wall-drawing and a new video. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first extensive monograph published by Mousse publishing. The book which will feature an essay by Lulu co-founder Chris Sharp, a selection of texts by the artist, as well as an interview between Saeed and the German artist Jochen Lempert.
Lin May Saeed was born in 1973 in Würzburg and lives and works in Berlin. A selection of recent and upcoming solo exhibitions includes: Studio Voltaire, London (2018); St. Jerome and the Lion, Nicolas Krupp Gallery, Basel (2016); Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main (2016); The Silence of Animals, Julius Casear project space, Chicago (2015). A selection of recent and upcoming group exhibitions includes: Metamorphosis (curated by Chus Martínez), Museo Castello di Rivoli, Turin (February 2018); La fin de Babylone (curated by Chus Martínez), KölnSkulptur #9, Cologne, DE (October, 2017); The World Without Us, Brennan & Griffin, New York (2017); 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Center for Style, Akademie der Künste Berlin (2016).
Lulu is an independent, Mexico City-based project space founded and run by the artist Martin Soto Climent and the independent curator Chris Sharp.
