Mandy El-Sayegh x Alethia Antonia

Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985) lives and works in London, where she received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Westminster in 2007, followed by an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Her first solo institutional show, the specially commissioned installation Cite Your Sources, was held at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2019. Other solo exhibitions of El-Sayegh’s work have been organised at UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, US (2022); Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France (2021); Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Bétonsalon, Paris, France (2019); Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong (2019); and The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico (2018). Her performances have been showcased at London Gallery Weekend, London, UK (2022); UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, US (2022); Frieze LIVE, London, UK (2020); and Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2017-18).

In her paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations and videos, Mandy El-Sayegh creates layered anthologies of found text and images from a variety of sources. These include newsprint, advertisements, aerial maps, anatomy books and her father's Arabic calligraphy, which take on unexpected new meanings through proximity. Set adrift from their original contexts, these fragments become open to multiple readings that are personally, socially or politically determined and undermine the supposed objectivity of language and media. The notion of corporeality is crucial in El-Sayegh's work – she refers to her collage process as 'suturing' and her painted surfaces as 'skins'. 

For Move Festival, El-Sayegh presents a new, site-specific performance, En masse (2022), in collaboration with choreographer Alethia Antonia and composer Lily Oakes. The performance takes as a starting point the interiority of a singular body, restricted within the schema of a grid. A recurring motif in the artist’s practice, the ‘grid’ is a structure that catches matter, trapping and instilling meaning in recognizable forms. Through gestural acts, the performance explores what it means to move past this grid; to question schematic restrictions in cultural arenas. Superimposed on the stage is footage taken by the artist at Notting Hill Carnival, a street festival in London anchored in cultural resistance, dance and sound. As masses of pulsating bodies appear in waves, an original score by Lily Oakes features the voices of El- Sayegh and Antonia in muffled conversations, heartrending melodies, and hypnotic rhythms. Speaking to the impossibility of containing collective agitation, El-Sayegh attests, ‘pulsation always escapes the grid.’