Saban, Ody
Author
Saban, Ody,
(1953), Turkey
Biography
Ody Saban (1953) was born in Istanbul, Turkey. Her parents – a Spanish-Turkish mother and a Sephardic Jew father – sent her to a Catholic school. They divorced while she was still a child. The Turkish craft skills she learned thanks to her stepfather, the diverse cultural environment surrounding her, and her mother’s collection of traditional embroideries all had a profound effect on her.
Following the death of her father, she emigrated to Israel in 1969 to live on a kibbutz. She enrolled at the University of Haifa, where she attended a teaching seminar in the visual arts. She then moved to Paris, where she attended the School of Fine Arts. Following a serious car accident while in Anatolia, Saban underwent major surgery without anaesthesia. She later returned to France, after several trips and long stays in the United States and Egypt. She gave birth to a daughter in 1982 and brought her up alone.
Saban explores multiple forms of expression: the visual arts – drawing, painting, and sculpture – as well as dance, performance, poetry, and artists’ books. Her work is linked to her political commitments, notably feminist struggles and the artists’ squatter movement in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, in which she played a major role. She has been part of a group of Surrealist artists since the 1990s, with whom she invents and circulates games and collective works. Her works at the Collection de l’Art Brut are made using India ink and watercolour on Japanese paper. These dense, varied compositions focus on representations of the face, and more broadly on the body and its erotic power. In this way, she creates imaginary portraits whose aim is not to provide a likeness but rather to ‘express a life force’.