Galleria Tiziana Di Caro presents Our love is my studio, the first solo exhibition by Stéphanie Saadé at the gallery, with an opening reception on Thursday, 16 October, 2025, at 7:00 PM.

The exhibition features a selection of works created between 2014 and 2025. The diverse media employed – including installation, sculpture, drawing, and collage – eloquently delineate a wide-ranging artistic exploration. Stéphanie Saadé’s research is rooted in personal experience and memory, conceptually transformed through a practice that relies on subtle hints and powerful metaphors.

The title, Our love is my studio, was conceived by the artist to reference a profound personal journey. It speaks to a practice that has been forged and transformed by evolving at a distance from her native country.

After the Beirut blast of August 2020, which destroyed both her home and studio, the artist was forced to leave her country. This exile fundamentally reoriented her practice, as the studio ceased to be the physical space she knew in Beirut and instead shifted to the domestic space of her apartment in Paris –more a mental refuge than a traditional studio. The "love" in the title is the singular force fuelling her practice and generating artworks. In moments of profound rupture, love can conjure new ideas and forms, becoming the very prerequisite for creation. The chosen adjective, "Our," speaks to a search for reciprocity – potentially a shared language between the artist, her works, her loved ones, and the public.

The exhibition opens with a small piece titled Today I felt like a change in perspective (2025): a postcard of Paris on which Saadé has inverted its traditional use by placing the recipient’s address and details on the front, over the image. By sending it to the gallery, she conveyed a precise message: today I felt the need to change perspective. With this simple yet profound act, the artist begins her relational journey with the gallery and its viewers, inviting them to experience this change in perspective as well, through the show.

In the sculptural piece Mariage (Marriage) (2014), the bits of four keys are welded together, forming a cross or a crossway. The result is a harmonious object, a delicate metaphor for union – the fusion of entities that were once separate.

The same room presents a collection of works that, at first glance, appear to be of different natures. Among them is The four corners of the world (2016), a simple frame that is, in essence, empty, with nothing to protect. Upon closer observation, however, one’s attention is immediately drawn to its wooden profiles. Each side of the square is crafted from a unique type of wood, each embodying a cardinal point: one from the north, one from the south, one from the east, and one from the west.

Filter (2023) is a collage composed solely of filters leftover from smoked cigarettes, meticulously gathered on a vertical surface. Here, too, there is a clear reference to the theme of time. The collection of these individual filters, along with the space of waiting, is concentrated on a surface that is both small and intimately personal.

The practice of collecting and assembling is repeated in Flower terrazzo (2024), a work that at first appears to be a portion of a terrazzo floor – a Venetian flooring technique highly emblematic of Lebanese homes. However, the texture here is not marble, but petals from flowers received and bought by the artist and her daughter. After withering, the flowers are gathered, dried, crushed into smaller bits, and meticulously assembled on paper. Each of these works results from a slow process in which the artist collects material at home, her attention gradually shifting toward these everyday elements within the space where she lives and works.

Her former home in Beirut, which also housed her studio, is represented in We’ve been swallowed by our houses (2020). This textile piece is an embroidered tablecloth featuring a large Aghabani motif (a traditional Syrian embroidery technique, commonly found in Lebanese homes) that traces the floor plan of her house in Lebanon, transformed into a labyrinth. Designed during the COVID-19 pandemic and executed by Syrian refugee women in Lebanon, the work depicts the space where she was confined – a seemingly privileged position for someone able to remain in the safety of their home, removed from the broader context. Yet during that time, our homes were transformed into labyrinths, where we wandered almost exclusively within familiar walls, unable to find a way out.

The series respectively titled Travel diaries (2014) and Golden memories (2015) both enact an act of alteration and, simultaneously, of emphasis. In the first, Saadé highlights the folds of travel documents – kept in her bag throughout her journeys – using 24-carat gold leaf. These creases in the paper become both a metaphor for the journey and a trace of the passage of time – the very time the artist spent moving, relocating, and distancing herself. Golden memories, on the other hand, consists of family photographs whose details remain unknown to us, as they are entirely covered in 24-carat gold leaf – a material that inexorably freezes the passage of time on both the memories and the photographic paper.

The Pyramid (2022) series is composed of small sculptures made by layering a single item of clothing in all its sizes, inspired by the artist’s daughter, from her newborn days onwards. The garments progressively grow larger over time, and when stacked in chronological order, they take on the form of small pyramids. The project comprises two site-specific installations that adapt to the space: Stage of life (2022) occupies a section of the floor and consists of a set of bedsheets used by the artist during her adolescence. The various sheets are cut into strips, which are subsequently sewn together to correspond to the perimeter of the artist's current apartment in Paris. Building a home with time (2019) is a long necklace composed of 2,832 beads, which is the number of days elapsed between the artist's birth and the official date of the end of the Lebanese Civil War.