Visual artist born in 1953 in Istanbul, based in Paris since the late 1970s.
Life
Ody Saban was born into a Jewish family in Istanbul and grew up between Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino) and Turkish. In 1969 she left for Israel, where she studied at an art school in Haifa, then spent a long time in the United States before settling in Paris. There she attended classes at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts intermittently, while living mostly outside the official circuits.
In 1983 she co-founded the artists’ collective Art Cloche, of which she was the only woman; after the eviction of the squat where it was based, she founded Art Cloche 2, an all-female group.
The work
Drawings, paintings, lithographs, performances, calligraphed or screen-printed poems and artists’ books make up her work. In it she brings back a sign of her own invention, the kus, an imaginary letter inspired by the vulva, and crosses feminism, mythology, the Kabbalah, eroticism and references to the Mother Goddess of the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. The review Raw Vision links her approach to Surrealist and Lacanian explorations of the unconscious.
“Ody Saban’s latest series of paintings depicts large flying ships that connect her to revolutionary utopia and celebrate, in her own erotic and loving way, the theme of emigration. Ody Saban draws in Indian ink on silk paper and papers from the Far East, and practises watercolour and painting (oil and acrylic). These kinds of embroideries in warm colours recall miniatures, but also the cosmopolitan world with which she remains imbued. Her drawings evoke loving eroticism, and each sheet is filled with entanglements of bodies, faces and flowers, thus expressing female fullness. If she identifies with Lilith, the accursed woman, it is the better to fight misogyny, but also to reveal the magic that emanates from her world, charged with fantastic dreaminess.”
Exhibitions and collections
- Tender Gatherings of Women and Other Wonders, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, September 2022, with a talk led by Thomas Mordant on 22 September 2022.