The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust by Stéphanie Saadé
Emerging directly from the artist’s practice, the exhibition’s title ties a paradox. Dust – quantifiable yet defying the order of measurement – becomes at once the first and last trace, origin and remainder. A minimal unit of inhabitation, a frictional indicator of an event that resists closure, dust here is matter in suspension, active and unresolved. Each particle reconfigures what it touches into a spatial-temporal knot, vibrating across unstable durations and transforming chronology into a field of overlapping rhythms.
Presenting major works from recent years alongside site-specific interventions, the exhibition alters the architectural fabric of the Twin Galleries. At its core, a new commission, reproducing at full scale the floor of the artist’s family home, operates as a field of spatial memory, setting the rhythm of displacement and re-composition. Embroidered partitions and reopened apertures generate spatial shifts; temporal calligrams transcribe the drift of seconds and minutes into an architecture of granular time; scraps of discarded paper conjure the entropy of the everyday – a tentative effort to salvage and reassemble what slips away. Through an unfolding of crossings, asymmetries, and intentional misfits, the works interfere with the memory of the Sursock house and with the artist’s own domestic dislocations, manifesting a precise yet phantomatic intensity.
Echoing the lived experience of repeated ungroundings and reconstructions, these gestures play with the persistence of fragments, always in motion, evading capture and erasure. No narrative emerges intact. The exhibition itself becomes a thought experiment in disjointed temporalities, recurrence, and material transmutation. (AD)
Curated by: Anne Davidian
Biographies:
Stéphanie Saadé (b. 1983, Lebanon) lives and works between Beirut, Paris, and Amsterdam. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and completed postgraduate studies at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. She was an artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2014–2015), and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2015). In 2023, she was selected for the Accélérations residency at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The works created during this residency were acquired and exhibited in the museum’s permanent collection.
Her solo exhibitions include Pakt (Amsterdam, NL), Kunsthaus Pasquart (Biel, CH), Museum Van Loon (Amsterdam, NL), Parc Saint Léger (Pougues-les-Eaux, FR), Maison Salvan (Labège, FR), and a duo show at Marres, Maastricht (NL). She has participated in group exhibitions at leading institutions such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), Punta della Dogana (Venice, IT), Sharjah Biennial 13 (UAE), Hessel Museum (New York, USA), MUCEM (Marseille, FR), MuHKA (Antwerp, BE), MOCA (Toronto, CA), Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris, FR), Jameel Art Center (Dubai, UAE), Villa Empain (Brussels, BE), Het Noordbrabants Museum (’s-Hertogenbosch, NL), Centraal Museum (NL), Mosaic Rooms (London, UK), Poush (Aubervilliers, FR), Beirut Art Center and Home Works 7 (Beirut, LB). Her first monograph, Building a Home With Time, was published following her exhibition at Kunsthaus Pasquart. Her works belong to collections including the Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), Museo MAXXI (Rome, IT), CNAP (FR), FMAC (Paris, FR), FRAC Franche-Comté (FR), Centraal Museum (Utrecht, NL), Barjeel Art Foundation (Sharjah, UAE), and the Saradar Collection (Beirut, LB).
Anne Davidian is a curator and researcher exploring alternate social imaginaries, with a focus on non-oppressive communal forms. Her recent projects include How to Hold Your Breath, 2024, Asian Art Biennial (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts), Gharib, the Pavilion of Armenia at the 59th Venice Art Biennale; What Makes an Assembly? (Sternberg Press, 2022), a cross-disciplinary publication on practices of assembling across histories and geographies, as well as collaborations with Centre Pompidou and Le BAL in Paris. She is currently curating the opening festival for the new Almaty Museum of Arts, launching in September 2025.
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With special thanks to: Fatma Cheffi, Maissa Maatouk, Marwan Rizkallah
With the contribution of:
