Abyssal Zone
2026
Glass and rebars
In Abyssal Zone by Neda Saeedi (b. 1987, Tehran), glass volumes, suspended within an iron skeletal frame, hold fragmented bodily gestures: a hand, a bowed head, a partial embrace. The sculptural installation, commissioned for the Kyiv Biennial at KW, echoes the statue Mutter Heimat, a part of Berlin's Soviet War Memorial at Treptower Park. Representing the homeland, sacrifice, loss, victory, and national defense, this allegorical monument presents the sorrowful figure of a mother hunched in grief. In the exhibition space, the monument dissolves into segments, as if memory itself could not sustain a whole image. The transparency of the glass refuses monumentality; it leaks, reflects, and fractures its surroundings.
Saeedi's forms do not monumentalize loss but reveal its construction, how narratives are assembled like scaffolding, filling voids with partial truths. The work suggests that monuments are less anchors than placeholders, occupying gaps in collective memory, especially along for-mer Soviet borders like Berlin, where histories are most forcefully drawn and redrawn.
This logic extends to the condition of displacement. To arrive in a new land is often to compress language, gesture and history into something legible, translatable, a reduced version of the self. As that identity expands again over time, its fractures become visible and continuity reveals itself as approximation. Saeedi's sculpture inhabits this moment of re-expansion: The glass fragments do not resolve into wholeness, but insist on their seams and discontinuities. The work becomes not only a reflection on monuments filling narrative voids, but on the self as a similarly assembled, compressed, and imperfectly unfolded structure.
From exhibition Text by Sofie Krogh Christensen
photos© Frank Sperling, KW
