Elif Saydam

Through an expanded painting practice, Elif Saydam uses the language of decoration and ornamentation to rearrange systems of valuation and emphasis. In Turkish, the word “sanat” means art, but also skill, industry or craft. Saydam takes the duplicitous nature of the term seriously to conflate and collapse the neat distinctions between methods, materials and their social histories. The trashiest of objects are blessed as eternal and reliable, while devotional paintings are created to tarnish and fade, just as we do. Here, "embellish" is true to itself as a verb with two definitions: "To make something more attractive by the addition of details" and "To make a statement more interesting by adding extra details that are often untrue." Saydam lives and works between Berlin, DE and Izmir, TR.