Lin May Saeed

As part of the Thinking Like a Mountain project, and in connection with the ninth edition of the Biennale Gherdëina curated by Lorenzo Giusti, an exhibition paying tribute to the work of the artist Lin May Saeed (1973–2023), will be presented simultaneously in Bergamo and Ortisei.

May Saeed dedicated all her research to the world of animals and the relationships between human and non-human animals, developing a new iconography of interspecies solidarity.

Her practice, which ranges from sculpture to bas-relief, from drawing to cut paper, to Styrofoam, focuses on the production of works populated by animals of various geographical origins, and human figures from stories, fables and myths, creating cross-cultural and cross-species narratives, projected into an alternative common future.

The installation in GAMeC’s Spazio Zero focuses on animal figures—including dogs, pangolins, panthers, hyenas, calves, anteaters, and jackals—and will emphasize the centrality the artist intended to restore to them as opposed to the condition of subalternity to which humanity has relegated them. Represented through life-sized sculptures and bas-reliefs, the animals become outright protagonists in the exhibition space as individuals endowed with their own psychology, and not as objects.

Accompanying the exhibitions is a paperback published by Mousse Publishing featuring English, Italian, Arabic, and Ladino-speaking audiences the fables originally written in German by May Saeed. Illustrated with a selection of drawings on paper by the artist, the introduction is by Lorenzo Giusti.