Saeed Gebaan
VACUUM OF SELF
2026 Kinetic Installation Produced during the Intermix Residency Program at Cité internationale des arts, Paris, and presented at Open Studio Under the mentorship of Émilie Villez Face sculpted in collaboration with artist Céline Lallement
STATEMENT
How is a person formed by what they never understood?
We credit ourselves with what we know: our decisions, our convictions, whatever we can explain. But what shapes us precedes all of that. It reaches us before we have the means to understand it, settles beneath awareness, and works from there without consulting anyone. And when a whole generation passes through the same events, it becomes a generation that resembles itself in temperament, in what preoccupies it later, without knowing why. What happened to my generation through one window and one machine is happening now many times over: children into whose awareness wars are poured live, images that do not stop, events too far to understand and too close to avoid. The generation forming now is being formed by what none of us is noticing.
My research in Paris, drawing on Freud's unconscious, Le Bon's mass psychology, and Toffler's Future Shock .. arrived at this: the unconscious governs, and what we pass through in childhood is not a set of fleeting moments but building blocks in the formation of the individual and of the group.
The work is one living case. A Saudi living room of the 1990s, rebuilt from original pieces: furniture, a curtain, a window covered with plastic against chemical missiles, a vacuum cleaner on the floor. And a child holding its hose to his face, his face drawn in.
The scene is not a record of what happened. It is the rendering of an imagined state that stayed lodged in the unconscious: that the machine would take him inside. And the imagining was not his alone it was made with the tools of his time and its conceptions: what he had seen, what had worked on him, what he had come to believe in his era. A child interprets what he cannot understand through the images his time has handed him. That is why the face takes this form: not the shape of the fear, but the shape of the imagination that fear and curiosity made together.
The scene is not explained to the visitor. They are left before it, where perception arrives ahead of understanding at the same edge where a self is formed, silently, without permission.
THE WORK
A Saudi living room of the 1990s, rebuilt from original pieces: furniture of the period, a floral curtain, an old television, switched off. Behind the curtain the window is covered with plastic and tape. On the floor stands a 1980s vacuum cleaner, of the same kind my mother used, its sound running in the room. audible, without being intrusive.
The child sits on a small chair, holding the hose to his face.
The face is drawn in. Every feature pulls toward the nozzle, and the eyes move, searching. This is what I imagined at two: that it would suck me in, shrink me, take me inside. The face is that imagining, made.
His body is epoxy and resin; his face sculpted by hand, cast from a mould and rendered in rubber, hand-painted, with the eyebrow hair implanted. His hands were cast the same way. His hair is an implanted wig; his clothing and socks are of the period. And his eyes are programmed screens.
PROCESS ARCHIVE
This installation grew out of a written inquiry I completed in 2026 during my Intermix residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, under the mentorship of Émilie Villez, titled The Shock of Change and the Formation of Contemporary Consciousness tracing how human personality takes shape in every era, drawing on Freud’s unconscious, Le Bon’s mass psychology, and Toffler’s “Future Shock.” The research led me to a conviction: that consciousness is only the surface of waking life, and that the unconscious runs deeper in determining personality and its origins; that it is the question not the answer about the realities we live that forms, in the unconscious, our characters and behaviors. I came to understand that what we pass through in childhood is never a set of fleeting moments, but building blocks in the formation of every individual, group, and generation a silent foundation lodged in the unconscious, that deepest governor of the self. Everything we live, alone or together, leaves its lasting mark on the shaping of identity and social behavior, even when we never perceive it. Read the full research →
CLOSING STATEMENT
The room exists now outside me ... its furniture, its curtain, its covered window, a child holding a hose to his face. I built it so that someone else could stand before it and feel something before knowing what it is. That feeling, and not the understanding that follows it, is what remains .
MATERIALS
The body: Epoxy and resin structure; face sculpted by hand, cast and rendered in rubber, hand-painted with implanted eyebrow hair; hands cast and finished the same way; implanted-hair wig; eyes made of programmed screens and lenses.
The setting: Original Saudi furniture of the 1990s, curtain, small chair, table, old television, period clothing and socks, plastic sheeting and tape on the window.
Machine and sound: Original 1980s vacuum cleaner, sound, fan.
Dimensions: Room installation, 4 × 5 m