Frieze London 2019

In Mandy El Sayegh’s work, the body functions as a central locus, a core from which broader exploration of the political, the psychological, the social and the linguistic can emerge. Encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, research, drawing and writing in the form of diagramming, her practice constitutes an expanded field within which issues such as cultural trauma, the formation of subjectivity and breakdowns in socio-linguistic orders are interrogated.

El Sayegh mobilises psychoanalytic concepts in the service of a formal, rather than a clinical or therapeutic practice. Interested in the paranoiac subject’s world view as a response to fragmentation, dislocation, and alienation from social fields, the El Sayegh considers the possibilities of approaching art-making from this perspective.

Through a methodological procedure of fragmentation, the artists uses her own Gaza heritage as a field of exploration, resisting however the pressure to collapse meaning into the purely autobiographical, instead aiming to address wider, shared experiences of cultural trauma, erasure and its effects as seen through the lens of Biopolitics.