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  "description": "Kunsthalle Bern presents Lin May Saeed. Sculptures and drawings by the German Iraqi artist who made speciesism a material question. Until May 2026.",
  "path": "/lin-may-saeed-kunsthalle-bern/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-18T15:00:44.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.munchiesart.club",
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  "textContent": "**Lin May Saeed - Kunsthalle Bern**\n\n**Artist:**\nLin May Saeed\n\n**Exhibition:**\nLin May Saeed\n\n**Venue:**\nKunsthalle Bern\n\n**City:**\nBern, Switzerland\n\n**Dates:**\n6 March 2026 - 10 May 2026\n\n**Address:**\nHelvetiaplatz 1, CH-3005 Bern\n\n**Photography:**\nAndy Keate; Wolfgang Günzel; Andrej Vasilenko\n\n**Image Courtesy:**\nCourtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main\n\n**Contact:**\npress@kunsthallebern.ch\n\n## Kunsthalle Bern Presents Lin May Saeed\n\nThere is a persistent assumption in Western visual culture that when an animal appears in a work of art, it is there to say something about us. It carries a symbol, or stands in for a condition, or decorates the margins of a narrative whose center is always human. What happens when that arrangement is simply refused?\n\nThe refusal, in the work of Lin May Saeed, is formal rather than polemical. It does not announce itself. It happens at the level of material, of composition, of how a figure is placed in relation to another figure, and what that placement implies about standing.\n\n> Saeed's animals are neither rescued nor romanticized. They occupy the same moral and spatial ground as the human figures beside them, and that, precisely, is the argument.\n\nKunsthalle Bern presents this posthumous survey at its Helvetiaplatz building, an institution with a sustained commitment to practice that operates at the intersection of formal and political argument.\n\nThe timing carries weight. Saeed, who died in 2023 shortly before the opening of her solo exhibition  _The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise_ at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, left a body of work that has since traveled through GAMeC in Bergamo, Sapieha Palace in Vilnius, and Buitenplaats Kasteel Wijlre, each presentation extending the reach of a practice that had been building for nearly two decades.\n\nHer works are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou Paris, the National Museum of Art in Oslo, and the Museum Folkwang in Essen, among others.\n\n****Lin May Saeed,**** __Ameisenbär / Anteater__ , 2018, styrofoam, steel, acrylic paint and charcoal. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main\n\nThe  _Ameisenbär/Anteater_ from 2018 holds a kind of patient authority. Built from Styrofoam, steel, acrylic paint, and charcoal, the animal occupies its wooden platform in a stance that registers neither aggression nor submission.\n\nThe Styrofoam is not incidental, it is a material that carries no cultural prestige, and yet the form it takes here, this slow armored body with its improbable elongated snout, seems to require real attention before it gives anything back.\n\nThe work insists on being encountered rather than read.\n\n****Lin May Saeed**** ,  __St. Jerome and the Lion__ , 2016, installation view, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, 2023. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main. Photo: Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin\n\n _St. Jerome and the Lion_ from 2016 reaches into a specific iconographic tradition: the ascetic saint and the great cat, a pairing Western viewers will half-recognize from devotional painting where charity and hierarchy tend to run together.\n\nSaeed renders both figures in bent steel, linear, transparent, each contour made from the same lacquered wire. The lion is no smaller and no less present than Jerome; the two share a plane where the usual distinction between subject and beast seems to have been quietly revoked.\n\n****Lin May Saeed**** ,  __St. Jerome and the Lion__ , 2016, steel, lacquer. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main.****Lin May Saeed**** ,  __Barque__ , 2021, steel, styrofoam, wood, cotton, acrylic paint, straw, hay, paper. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main.\n\nThe  _Barque_ of 2021 stages a different kind of scene. A camel, a bird, and a robed figure share a crescent-shaped vessel built from steel, Styrofoam, wood, cotton, straw, hay, and paper, an ark that does not rank its passengers.\n\nThey hold their positions together, subject to the same drift. The work holds a question without resolving it: whether this arrangement was always possible, and what prevented it.\n\n****Lin May Saeed**** , exhibition view,  __Untouchability__ , Sapieha Palace, Vilnius, 2025. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Sapieha Palace, Vilnius; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main****Lin May Saeed**** , exhibition view,  __Untouchability__ , Sapieha Palace, Vilnius, 2025. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main****Lin May Saeed**** , exhibition view,  __Untouchability__ , Sapieha Palace, Vilnius, 2025. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main.\n\nDebates around speciesism, the term itself remains contested, have grown considerably louder in the years since these works were made. Saeed's practice predates much of this recent urgency, which is part of what makes it interesting to encounter now.\n\n _Ghazal Relief (V2)_ from 2022, a layered panel of Styrofoam, plaster, ceramics, and cotton balls, places a gazelle in a painted landscape alongside scattered human-scale detritus. The animal is not fleeing. It is not domesticated. It is simply there, amid the clutter of a world that has always been shared.\n\n****Lin May Saeed**** ,  __Ekidu__ , 2007, charcoal and ink on paper. Courtesy of the estate of Lin May Saeed; Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt/Main\n\nThe earliest work in the presentation, the painted canvas  _Ekidu_ from 2007, shows that this was not a late position, it was a consistent formal commitment that ran through nearly everything Saeed made.\n\nWhat the Bern exhibition offers, across its range of materials and years, is the record of someone working steadily on a problem most institutions were not yet prepared to take seriously.\n\nInstagram Lin May Saeed\nKunsthalle Bern on Instagram \n\n* * *",
  "title": "Neither Metaphor Nor Pet: A Preview",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-18T18:41:58.637Z"
}