The large installation The Travels of Here and Now, occupies the rear space at AKINCI. It also adapts to it as it was conceived and tailor-made for another space: presented for the first time in Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam in September 2019, it originates from the history and the dimensions of the Drakensteyn room of the eponym museum. The work departs from the XVIIIth century wall-hangings by Jurriaan Andriessen of the Drakensteyn room of Museum Van Loon. Initially painted for the Drakensteyn Castle in Lage Vuursche, their overall journey, from their initial location to their new home in the museum, with the adaptation and thorough restoration that they underwent, offers a myriad of poetical visual stories to tell; they trigger notions of displacement, estrangement identity and nostalgia, recurrent in Saadé’s work. The seascapes, an exception in the painter’s oeuvre, moreover represent scenes taking place on the Mediterranean seashore, familiar and dear to Saadé. In The Travels of Here and Now she calls back and makes visible again the paintings’ beautiful ‘ghosts’: all the presently invisible parts which have been cut out, grafted, overpainted or interchanged, highlighting a rich and fascinating patchwork. In Museum Van Loon, the strips of painting were confronted with the original wall-hangings that surrounded them and which they had been copied from. This time, the fragmented images, mainly parts of landscape (sky, grass, plants, sea, …) are
given a chance to exist independently, a possibility to escape their original space-time frame and the history associated with it. They can be looked at in a different way. The viewer could relate them to different contexts and geographies from her/his own memories, desires or projections.