the shape of distance
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THE SHAPE OF DISTANCE
BY CHIARA IANESELLI, INDEPENDANT CURATOR, FOR THE SHAPE OF DISTANCE, SOLO EXHIBITION STÉPHANIE SAADÉ, GREY NOISE GALLERY, DUBAI, 2016.
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that
moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
David Eagleman, Forty Tales from the Afterlives, 2010.
In his book Forty Tales from the Afterlives the neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the scenario that people experience while waiting for their
names to be pronounced for the last time: a passageway where you can hear the persistent steps going back and forth. Suddenly you hear a name and
that man leaves the waiting room; he died. We are callers; in the moment when we pronounce the name of someone for the last time we allow or
condemn her / him to die. But Stéphanie Saadé is not: she acts in a more subtle way, as she doesn’t emit a single sound; her mouth keeps safely
closed. Nevertheless, she is able to name without naming, to touch without touching, to remember without remembering. She holds tight many
substances and traces, identities not yet disappeared, because she doesn’t allow anything to leave her. The materials she generously shares with us in
the gallery hardly make steps, they perhaps float, sometimes swim and mostly sail. We could argue that Twelve Tales from the Afterlives are presented
in Stéphanie Saadé’s exhibition The Shape of Distance.
In her work Golden Memories, she doesn’t pronounce the name of a person, but addresses herself. We can read in her carefully written notes that
accompany the exhibited artworks: “A photograph from the artist’s childhood is covered with gold leaf. The past memory is no longer accessible, but
now mirrors the present reality”. A relation is established with childhood, this golden period in life, whose end cannot be determined by universal factors:
it varies indeed, according to countries and cultures. In the case of the artist, her childhood ended at the same time as the Lebanese Civil war. Her
earliest memories are closely associated with this political event, and are inseparable from it. Strangely in the title, they have been tinted with more
sweetness, but nevertheless remain invisible to us, who become visionaries by the mirroring golden veil.
Modern science proves today that our body constantly renews itself, except for the cerebral cortex cells, the inner lens cells of the eye and perhaps the
muscle cells of the heart. These components constitute the “present reality” - the continuum Saadé is addressing in her sentence: an on-going part of
the human being that stays unaltered. But if that part is not subjected to metamorphosis we understand that even a date can age, as is clearly visible in
Down to Earth: “The artist looks for her birthdate in three drop-down menus, at ten years intervals. In thirty years, the date has aged, and doesn’t appear
anymore”. How can we face these issues? By building extensions on pupils’ chairs and tables, as in The Shape of Distance? Or by representing time in
circles instead of linear ways as in Moon Pills, considering how time cycles function in other planets or eras?
As said, the Twelve tales presented are not written in words, they rather constitute signals that a cosmonaut could easily grab and convey in the darkest
space, to imagine distances among interstellar particles:
This world, as it is, is not bearable. So I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, something that would sound insane maybe, but that is not of this
world.
Albert Camus, Caligula, 1944.
In the exhibition, Saadé suggests the existence of other scales, showing the unexploited potentials of human geometry. In The Day in Order a ruler
conveys visions and not centimetres or millimetres: wherever it points the land will merge with the horizon. According to her vision, and that of Georges
Schehadé, “the sky is a village” 1; densely populated. Why? The sky, which constituted the background for many portraits of the artist’s childhood, had
mostly served as a backing, as useless atmosphere. Still, it contains so much. Therefore Saadé decided to bring it to the foreground: she reframed the
pictures in a way that the sky would become the protagonist, and printed them at the size of her actual studio’s windows, then exposing the prints to the
weather elements. Can a printed particle meet its own twin that has been floating in the air or is it, as Saadé proposes, that: “The blue sky doesn’t
betray all that it has witnessed?” We are left to make up our own minds.
Processes of change, metamorphosis, are also witnessed in the work Graceful Degradation, where a ladder is constituted by iron, stainless steel and
brass. The material’s value - according to human standards - increases with the height. But, as has been whispered, we should commit to the memory
of the Allegory of Alchemy sculpted on the middle pillar of the portal of Notre-Dame in Paris - same is the number of rungs of Saadé’s ladder: 9; Lady
Alchemy reminds us that metals can be transformed. Graceful Degradation can perhaps take us closer to the sky to better see the moon. Isn’t it that the
artist used both alchemy and the ladder for Moongold where the moon is gilded with Moon Gold leaf?
She is showing us many possible directions coexisting in the gallery space: “On an intricate map, arrows are pointing towards the East or the West, the
Right or the Left, while others indicate the North or the South, the bottom or the top”. The intersection of all these references points allows the visitor to
experience the layering of the artist’s exquisite visionary worlds: a process of synaesthesia might arise in the moment when we are hypnotized by the
rainbows of Re-Enactment LB/ Taxi and we smell Re-Enactment LB/ Jasmine where “A pile of jasmine flowers drying seen in a house in Beirut is
reproduced”. In a conversation, Stéphanie told me more about the flowers:
They have 5 petals, so they are referred to as star-shaped flowers. Re-Enactment LB/ Jasmine will be a triangle of fallen stars on the floor. Stars which
would have stayed, after falling, at the tiny size they have when they are at a distance from us in the sky. The fragrance of the flowers is localized on the
internal side of the flowers petals.
They exhale their most delicious perfume at night.
Re-Enactment LB/ Jasmine might be seen, like Artificial Nostalgia, as a monument to her private memory: the key opens the door to the house in which
she grew up as a child, in Lebanon, although the sand is from Dubai; the flowers, seen in a state officer bureau in Beirut, might have disappeared by
now or they might still be there, in the position that is now visible in the gallery. The artist is showing modest, unpretentious memorials, where visitors
are apparently invited to be part of her most intimate life. But her Artificial Nostalgia reveals us a deeper sense of the diaspora, where citizens, no matter
where they are, regularly become foreigners, in an on-going alienation. Perhaps the only solution is to keep breathing close to each other, inflating the
same balloon that has flown for thousands of miles landing there, in the gallery Grey Noise2.
1 Georges Schehadé, Monsieur Bob’le, 1951
2 Souffles d’Artistes - work by Stéphanie Saadé and Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, 2016, inflated balloon, breaths of two artists in love.
Exhibition View from The Shape of Distance.
