Mandy El-Sayegh | Booth AS3 | Modern & Contemporary
For Abu Dhabi Art Lawrie Shabibi will show a solo presentation by Mandy El Sayegh, featuring large-scale paintings and sculptural works situated within an immersive installation, created in-situ by the artist.
Mandy El-Sayegh works across diverse media to examine how social, cultural and political orders are formed and deconstructed in the contemporary world. In large-scale paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations, performances and videos, she collages disparate fragments of information together, interrogating the ways that meaning might emerge from the relationship between these different source materials. Her works often feature newsprint, advertisements, aerial maps, anatomy books and calligraphy, alongside hand-painted elements and non-traditional materials such as latex, allowing her to move between material, corporeal and linguistic frameworks.
El-Sayegh is known for creating immersive environments which disrupt the supposed neutrality of the white gallery space, layering the walls and floors with collected materials, reflecting the significance in her practice of research and collecting – the creation of quasiarchives which seek to reframe marginalised histories.
At Abu Dhabi Art the walls of the space are covered with layers of newsprint and screenprinted imagery, veiled in white pigment. This wall-piece is a field which holds new paintings, including examples of the artist’s Net-Grid series. In these works, El-Sayegh overlays silkscreen prints, personal memorabilia, found objects and linguistic elements with handpainted grids to consider the proliferation of materials and information, as well as the structures that contain them. The painted grids function as a symbolic method of holding disparate fragments, combining them into a coherent whole, yet the fragile incompleteness of the grid motif hints at the impossibility of achieving a fully resolved form, instead resulting in slippage and overspill.
Also on view are works from a new series titled Reverse White Grounds. These works are a development of the artist’s White Grounds series, a title which refers to the technique of priming a surface, traditionally with layers of white gesso. This series reveals El-Sayegh’s interest in disrupting this process, and creating an uneven foundation for her works. The pristine surfaces of El-Sayegh’s paintings are interrupted by ‘bruising’ of pigments emerging from layers beneath, along with fragments of collaged studio debris. The Reverse White Grounds take this process another step, overlaying the works with vibrant reds, purples and iridescence. The tones are connected to bodily tissues, reflecting El-Sayegh’s interest in anatomy, and the idea of re-inserting of the body into the abstraction of the painted plane. Screen printed renderings of maps and grid lines invite consideration of the political ‘bodies’ of nation states, and the symbolic structures which define and control them. The meditation on whiteness in this evolving series of paintings points to a consideration of structures of power and authority, within the history of painting, and in the wider world, which ‘grounds’ are constructed as spaces to articulate from, and who is afforded the status of ‘neutrality’?
A new sculptural work is also on view within the installation, just to state (2024), part of a series of table-vitrines which are created through processes of collection and assemblage in much the same way as El-Sayegh’s paintings. Objects drawn from the artists personal archive, including medical instruments, newsprint, painted canvas and latex are composed in a heavy stainless steel vitrine strongly reminiscent of an autopsy slab. This sculptural assemblage draws attention to the material quality of the paintings, reinforces the primacy of the body within El-Sayegh’s practice, and acts as an invitation to take a forensic approach to viewing her works.
Mandy El-Sayegh is also set to debut a newly commissioned work, Psychic Self-Defence, created exclusively for the Gateway exhibition. Curated by Odessa Warren and Carine Harmand, this year's Gateway theme, Otra Orilla ("Another Shore"), celebrates the connections between the Arab world and Latin America, featuring artists such as Emilia Estrada, Alia Farid, Francisca Khamis Giacoman, and Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez. Through moving images, textiles, and installations, the exhibition delves into diasporic experiences, shared histories, and collective memory, illuminating the parallels between these two rich cultural regions.
Booth IAA-2 | Dima Srouji at the In & Around Program
We will also be featuring Dima Srouji as part of the In & Around program, highlighting her Maternal Labour series and The Rule of Superpositions. Maternal Labour consists of aluminum prints honoring Palestinian women who were hired by Western institutions in the 20th century to excavate their own land. The Rule of Superpositions, a floor installation, imagines a layered, archaeological space beneath the ground, revealing strata of Palestine’s past, present, and future. By depicting structures like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock, Srouji reclaims these buried histories and envisions how an archaeological site in Palestine might look 300 years from now.
The In & Around program at Abu Dhabi Art is part of the annual art fair’s broader mission to bring large-scale art installations and public artworks to different spaces within the fairgrounds and throughout Abu Dhabi. The program focuses on integrating art into the public sphere, engaging diverse audiences by placing installations from participating galleries in accessible, open locations. The In & Around installations highlight both regional and international artists, allowing the community to experience contemporary art in dynamic, large-format context.