Mandy El-Sayegh

London

Born in Selangor, Malaysia, the London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh trained as a painter, but since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2009 she has taken up other mediums including film, sculpture and sound. Her layered works combine a variety of source materials including newsprint, advertisements, aerial maps, anatomy books and her father’s Arabic calligraphy, which are fragmented and recontextualised in large-scale installations and on painted surfaces. ‘I’m interested in the idea of artefacts not as ethnographic evidence but as a portable ecology – they move, they travel, they contribute to cultural hybridity rather than cultural homogeny. All these elements are constantly remapping how we read history and how we consume the present,’ she has said. Recent years have brought solo exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin in Seoul (2021) and Palm Beach (2022), at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris (2021) and at the Chisenhale Gallery in London (2019). El-Sayegh’s work has also been included in the British Art Show 9, the London Drawing Biennial and in 2017 she was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women.

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