To being a daughter,
To being a mother,
To being a mother’s mother,
as if it’s a role, as it’s a cultural phenomenon and as a continuation. Sharing sleep with a mother has been a safe space. A safe space to slow down your clogged breath, let it out. You would close your eyes, bend and hugging knees closer to your chest and leave the head on the pillow’s corner. What’s on the other side of the bed?
Her side of the bed is not a statement but rather a questioning space that appeared in response to phantom conversations, collective readings, diary entries and stickers left right next to the nightstand from recent years. It reflects personal experiences and shares fragile fragments of thought. From this affective dimension – intimate, layered with ambivalence – Mia Melanie Saar invites you into an exploration of the relationship between mothers and daughters, where language fails, trembles, the message is misspelt and mistranslated, and the understanding is delayed or vanished.
What was it you said?
E̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶g̶e̶s̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶s̶t̶u̶r̶e̶.̶
I shouldhavewouldhave
She works with a personal archive through the lens of her family craftsmanship – quiltmaking and patchwork – as an indirect communicative tool, a thread that holds and repairs. Throughout the life of the artist, the craft, started with the passion of her grandmother, has always been accompanying the family in every space: as a warming quilt or a method of refining and “rescuing” existing materials.
Recollecting and pairing is seen not merely as an artistic framework, but as an essence of Saar’s painting practice. Deriving from Deborah Levy’s search for voice within the inability to speak her words, the works explore various modes of concealment – ranging from the physical and structural to the internal and sensory. Emotionally thrilling narratives can be hidden within objects, revealed only when lightened, or fade away over time; they can exist as a barely perceptible image or an internal experience. The exhibition is conceived as an two imaginary rooms of exploration where the visible and the hidden switch places – it is an attempt to find what was once hidden, or, conversely, to hide oneself.
Mia Melanie Saar (2000) is a painter and curator based in Estonia. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Pallas University of Applied Sciences in Tartu (2023) and furthered her studies at NABA in Rome, Italy (2024). Alongside, Saar became a co-founder and curator of Lauda Gallery in Otepää. Her practice is rooted in a deep connection to her South-Estonian heritage, transformed through an international artistic perspective. Saar’s paintings are characterised by the use of bold colours and expressive brushwork, consciously blending elements of naivism and surrealism. Working primarily with oil on canvas, she transforms mundane scenes into emotionally charged narratives, inviting viewers to rediscover curiosity within the raw authenticity of the human experience. Saar has exhibited her work in solo and group shows across Estonia and abroad, including London, Porto, and Helsinki.
Veronika Bedova (2002) is a photographer and curator based in Rome with an academic background in Fine arts. She has pursued her studies at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) across its London and Moscow campuses and holds a degree from the Accademia di Belle Arti di “Rosario Gagliardi” (MADE Program) in Siracusa. Her curatorial interests mainly revolve around relationship between language and communal memory/absense of memory, as well as intimate and repair forms of curation and storytelling. She is currently purchasing a Master of Arts degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA in Rome.
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art@miamelaniesaar.com , bedovaveronika@gmail.com
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