Saradar logo Saradar logo
Subscribe to our newsletter
Back

Stéphanie Saadé
We've Been Swallowed By Our Houses | 2020
Aghabani embroidery on cotton cloth. 240 x 140 cm. In We’ve Been Swallowed by Our Houses (2020), Saadé addresses the shift in perception of space in relation to the slow passage of time. During lockdown she measured her apartment in Beirut and drew a map of it before turning it into a human-scale labyrinth. The plan was then embroidered on a tablecloth made to the size of her dining table. The embroidery uses the Syrian traditional Aghabani technique composed of chain-stitches and spiral patterns – now available in Lebanon due to the presence of refugees, paradoxically, the ones who lost their home. The work expresses her feeling of a shrinking inaccessible outside space in relation to the densification of the – only accessible – interior space of the house. Imagine getting lost inside your own house... the title pictures home as a belly, evoking sacred and secular stories such as Jonas and the whale or Pinocchio... a pregnancy in reverse.

Reference SS-ISO-2020-A

Biography of the artist

Born in Beirut. 1983
Works and Lives in France, Paris


The work of Stéphanie Saadé develops a language of suggestion, playing with poetics and metaphor. She shares clues, signs, imageless and occasionally silent trails with us, which interact like the words of a single sentence. It is for the viewer to decipher them, as would an archaeologist faced with traces, fossils, and fragments. This enigmatic quality often stems from the artist’s own experience. In her oeuvre, personal experience is invoked exclusively as a universal subject. Stéphanie Saadé graduated in Fine Arts from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France and attended a post-graduate program at the China Academy of Arts, Hangzhou, China. She was an artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2014/2015), and the Cité Internationale des arts, Paris (2015). Saade is the 2018-19 recipient of the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) 3Package Deal program, a 1 year Interhistoricity scholarship linked to 4 renown museums and institutions of the city of Amsterdam..

To view all the texts related to this artist in the section archive of texts click here

Other works in the collection