List Projects 32: Elif Saydam

Berlin-based artist Elif Saydam conceives of painting as a space for the projection of fantasy.

Throughout history, many painting traditions have served the fantasies of a state or an imperial court, but Saydam’s approach emphasizes eros in the textures of everyday life. In their paintings, quotidian sites, including gas stations, apartment blocks, and convenience stores, are layered with gold and ornament, suggesting the persistence of fantasy—particularly the desires of precarious urban populations—in increasingly gentrifying and financialized cities.

Saydam’s paintings are rich with references to the history of the medium, particularly so-called “minor” genres like miniature painting and illuminated manuscripts. Their works often combine meticulous decorative elements with glimpses of daily experience and interjections of humor: “Don’t know why I have to work / Don’t know why I can’t play,” reads one recent, elaborately layered painting. Saydam’s textual sources are equally eclectic, ranging from twelfth-century Persian poetry and Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977) to the slogans of contemporary social movements. They also experiment with painting on unconventional surfaces and supports, including antique bathroom stall doors, anti-shoplifting mirrors, and kitchen sponges. 

Many of Saydam’s recent works have examined late-night stores in Berlin, known as Spätis or Spätkaufs, which sell beer, snacks, and other essentials. Throughout Germany, they are often run by Turkish, Kurdish, or Arabic-speaking people and are frequented by those from all walks of life. Saydam is drawn to how Spätis remain spaces of social interaction between individuals from various classes and identities—a rarity in increasingly stratified cities like Berlin. Saydam’s paintings are, likewise, places of encounter: between the exaltation of gold leaf and the offcast materials it adorns, between everyday reality and flights of fancy. Everywhere in these unexpected meetings is the possibility of love—or what the queer theorist Lauren Berlant referred to as “the misrecognition you can bear.”

List Projects 32: Elif Saydam is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, and Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant. 

Elif Saydam (b. 1985, Calgary, Canada) is a painter based in Berlin, Germany. They studied at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. They have recently had solo exhibitions at Simon Fraser University Galleries, Vancouver; Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin. They have been included in group exhibitions at Sanitorium, Istanbul; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Helena Anrather, New York. Their first monograph, Elif Saydam: TWO CENTS, was published by Mousse in 2022.