White Grounds 14

2019 - Installation (Installation)
258 x 210 cm

Mandy El Sayegh grew up in a medicalized environment, surrounded by anatomy, biology and psychology publications; these books inspire the figures that appear throughout her work. The work White Grounds 12 offers a bird’s eye view of a skull open from the front, belonging to a patient diagnosed with dementia who is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. White Grounds 10 depicts the body of an injured worker in China. What takes center stage in this work is not the political subtext, but the representation of flesh, turning blue, like death. At the opening of the exhibition “White Grounds” at Betonsalon in Paris, where this work was first exhibited, visitors were invited to walk across the latex canvasses that carpeted the ground. The odor of paint, the feeling of moving across the sticky surface added something organic and visceral to the experience. El-Sayegh cites the artist Kader Attia and his artistic ambition to “repair the world” as integral to her practice. She also notes her father’s native Gaza as an unresolved trauma transmitted through generations. For the artist, painting becomes a material for exchange through which sensitivity becomes a register of intelligibility, inciting the viewer to reconstruct the fragments of the exhibition and the world themself.

Beginning with rigorous research and resulting in a wide range of media, from layered paintings, to installation, diagram, sculpture, sound and video, El-Sayegh’s work is about systems of bodily, linguistic and political order among others, and their disintegration. This gives way to an exploration of the poetry that emerges from a reworking of such codes, and the new meanings that are created. Her work is both personal and political, often merging found references from the media, as well as intimate details, such as her father’s calligraphy work within the same space. In an interview with The Guardian, the artist describes her work as “a forensic thing. I’m laying it all out. I want everything in there, the political, the sexual… there is a terror in excess.” These fragmented units are then reconsidered as a coherent whole.

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