Neda Saeedi creates sculpture-based environments that trace ancestral knowledge, myths, and historical genealogies that stem from her visions of Mesopotamia and her immigrant cultural worker experience in Europe. As they collapse different times, forms, and narratives into each other, they question how architecture re-crafts the human body and its relation with the world through the artist’s idiosyncratic understanding of handicraft and sustainability. Inside her spaces, which feel both familiar and unexpected, she makes her audiences aware of a transgenerational poetics that can be ancient and futuristic at once. For her commission for the 4th Autostrada Biennale, she imagines an eye of the city gazing from the past into the future—inside the circular pedestal of the destroyed Partisan monument—symbolizing the everlasting story of migration and settlement. The glass work is inspired by lighthouse Fresnel lenses and the word Kosovo itself, which means “field of blackbirds.” Blackbirds only migrate in times of difficulty; they always come back to where they consider home. Six blackbirds circulating inside the eye highlight different the ethnicities of Kosovo in constant movement and return. Their everlasting movement hints at the many stories which wait to be told in this ancient part of the world.

Neda Saeedi (1987) was born in Tehran and lives and works in Berlin.

Supported by Goethe Zentrum Prishitna and Radiance

Text by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu

Photo credits Tuğhan Anıt