Lin May Saeed
Séance

11 SEP – 31 OCT 2026
Opening – 10 SEP 2026, 6-10 pm

For Berlin Art Week 2026, Meyer Riegger is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed. Throughout a career that was sadly cut short in 2023, Saeed campaigned, with delicate steadfastness, for a more equitable and just relationship between the animal world and humankind.

Séance brings together pieces spanning the entire career of the artist, including her earliest Styrofoam reliefs, backlit silhouettes, drawings, metal gates and later bronze-cast sculptures. The show, which is organised in close collaboration with The Estate of Lin May Saeed / Jacky Strenz, will also include a number of works that have never previously been exhibited. Séance also marks the first presentation of Saeed’s work in Berlin since The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt at the Georg-Kolbe-Museum in 2023.

Speaking of her art, Saeed stated: “I understand my works not as objects, but as subjects.” And her habitual subjects were the animals she cared for deeply. In the creation of her works, Saeed drew on a broad iconographic frame of reference that encompassed Greco-Roman and Egyptian sculpture, and natural history museum displays, as well as other sources. In sculptures like Milo, 2023 – a bronze cast of a dog sitting upright with its head bowed, created in the last year of the artist’s life – these subjects are depicted alone, given names and portrayed with a quiet dignity, occupying a place between the tangible and the supernatural. Other works have a more narrative nature – often drawing on myths and fables, animals are shown in communion with one another or with humans. Pieces from the series “The Liberation of Animals from their Cages”, for instance, which the artist began in 2006 and which refers to the animal liberation movement, generally depict moments immediately after animals have been freed from captivity. Similarly, a number of Saeed’s works draw on the “Seven Sleepers” – a tale present in both Christian and Islamic traditions, in which seven youths hide in a cave to escape persecution. According to the legend, following a long and divinely induced slumber, the group would wake many centuries later to a freer world. In Saeed’s version of the story, however, she recasts the seven as a union of animals and humans alike.

Through her practice, Saeed gave voice to the natural world and questioned the status quo of interspecies relationships that have become increasingly reinforced through the Anthropocene – with animals treated as subservient or inferior to humans and, often, relegated to mere tools to be exploited. With her sculptures, reliefs, drawings and videos, Saeed asked us to reconsider how we see animals, and how we live together with them and the planet more broadly. Filled not only with radical empathy and hope, but also humour, the works in Séance continue to advocate for an alternative – and possible – form of coexistence between humans and animals, whether now or in a future beyond Saeed’s lifetime or our own.

Lin May Saeed (born in Würzburg, 1973; died in Berlin, 2023) lived and worked in Berlin.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (2026); Buitenplaats Kasteel Wijlre (2025); GAMeC, Bergamo (2024); Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin (2023); Clark Art Institute, Williamstown (2020) and Studio Voltaire, London (2018).

Significant group exhibitions include those at K21, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; and LE CRÉDAC, Ivrysur- Seine (all 2025); Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp; Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (all 2021); Aspen Art Museum (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); mumok, Vienna; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (both 2018); and Bergen Kunsthall (2014). The artist also participated in Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024) and the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016).

Saeed’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; the National Museum of Art, Oslo; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown; Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany; Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen, Frankfurt; and Fondazione CRC, Cuneo.