Introduction
For Art Abu Dhabi, Lawrie Shabibi is proud to present a solo exhibition by Mandy El-Sayegh, one of the most compellingly rigorous voices in contemporary multidisciplinary art practice. Known for her densely layered canvases and structurally intricate installations, El-Sayegh transforms the gallery space into something closer to a living archive — a site where materials think, where surfaces remember, and where silence articulates what language cannot hold.
Her work is characterised by a meticulous methodology of assemblage and layering that does not merely combine elements but allows them to interact — colliding, sedimenting, and generating emergent meaning beyond what any single component could produce in isolation. To stand before one of El-Sayegh's works is to feel simultaneously enclosed and exposed: ordered and undone.
I am more interested in methodology and assemblage, rather than in the business of storytelling. — Mandy El-Sayegh
Materials as Language
A Practice Rich in Residue
El-Sayegh's visual vocabulary is deliberately promiscuous in its range: newsprint, advertisements, anatomy books, calligraphy, hand-painted grids, screen-printed imagery, and unconventional substances including latex. These are not mere materials — they are carriers of time, ideology, and body. Each element arrives with a prior life, a prior context, and in El-Sayegh's hands, that prior life is honoured, questioned, and made strange.
The physicality of her process mirrors its conceptual preoccupations. Latex behaves like skin. Newsprint is the skin of public narrative. Anatomy books insist on the body's interior logic. Together, they speak to what El-Sayegh calls the intersections between material, corporeal, and linguistic realms — a triangle of inquiry that animates her entire practice.
The Exhibition Space
White Walls, Disrupted
Visitors stepping into the Lawrie Shabibi booth at Art Abu Dhabi will not encounter the pristine neutrality of a conventional gallery. Instead, El-Sayegh layers dense fields of newsprint and screen-printed imagery across the gallery's white walls, then veils them in soft white pigment — a gesture of simultaneous concealment and revelation. The walls become strata. Surfaces become skins.
This immersive backdrop does not compete with the works on display; it produces them, contextualises them, and implicates the viewer in the logic of accumulation and erasure that drives El-Sayegh's practice. The booth itself becomes a total environment — a perceptual argument rather than a container for objects.
Series on View
New Series · Lawrie Shabibi Booth
Net-Grid Series
Silkscreened personal memorabilia and found objects merge with hand-painted grids, enacting the tension between containment and release, order and its inevitable failure.
New Works · Lawrie Shabibi Booth
Reverse White Grounds
Subverting traditional painting foundations, pigments bruise through white surfaces in reds and purples that evoke bodily tissue — canvases that are simultaneously cartographic and corporeal.
Separate Installation · Gateway Exhibition
Gateway: Solidarity in Cloth
A mannequin in martial arts-inspired garments evoking Palestinian taekwondo culture of the 1970s — a poetic act of defiance, honouring lineage and invoking Fanon, Palestine, and Puerto Rico.
On the Net-Grid Series
The Limits of Order
The Net-Grid series sits at the conceptual core of El-Sayegh's practice. Silkscreened personal memorabilia — photographs, documents, fragments of private correspondence — are overlaid with hand-painted grids, creating surfaces in perpetual negotiation between the systematic and the aleatory. The grid, that most rational of structures, becomes a site of undoing.
For El-Sayegh, these grids represent more than compositional choices; they embody the limits of order, hinting at incompleteness and instability. The grid promises containment but delivers its opposite. Each slippage mirrors the excess and overspill of reality — the way bodies exceed their charts, the way histories exceed their official accounts, the way meaning exceeds any attempt to pin it down.
This motif resonates deeply with El-Sayegh's conviction that fully contained narratives are illusory. The artist is deeply suspicious of the narrative arc, of the tidy resolution, of the story that knows where it is going. Her practice insists, instead, on the constitutive role of the fragment, the remainder, and the residue.
By dissecting language — such as headlines — and reassembling them, I aim to highlight how narratives are constructed and where power resides. — Mandy El-Sayegh
On the Reverse White Grounds
Bruised Surfaces, Political Depths
The Reverse White Grounds series builds upon El-Sayegh's earlier White Grounds body of work, subverting the conventional logic of painting from the inside out. Rather than working up from a neutral ground, El-Sayegh allows pigment to press through white surfaces — bruising, staining, insisting on presence. The result is a painting that appears to be revealing itself despite itself.
The intrusion of colour — particularly reds and purples — evokes the vitality of bodily tissue, bringing life and imperfection to otherwise controlled surfaces. This chromatic pressure aligns with El-Sayegh's sustained engagement with anatomy and the physicality of existence. The body is never merely metaphorical in her work; it is material and insistent.
Screen-printed maps and grid lines expand the symbolic scope of these works into the political realm, contemplating how nation-states and power structures exert control — over territory, over narrative, over bodies. A painting can hold a cartography and a heartbeat simultaneously. In El-Sayegh's hands, it does.
Separate Presentation at Art Abu Dhabi
Acts of Defiance in Cloth and Archive
Beyond the Lawrie Shabibi booth, El-Sayegh's participation in the Gateway Exhibition introduces another dimension of her practice — one where assemblage extends into acts of solidarity and protest. Central to this presentation is a mannequin dressed in martial arts-inspired garments drawing on the taekwondo uniforms that gained widespread use among Palestinians in the 1970s.
These garments carry the weight of collective memory, symbolising acts of defiance and protection whilst paying direct homage to the artist's father's era. The work draws explicit connections between the philosophical framework of Frantz Fanon and the solidarity movements that linked Puerto Rican and Palestinian liberation struggles — a linkage rendered not through rhetoric but through the texture of cloth and the logic of selective scansion.
Scansion — the rhythmic reading of a line of verse — here becomes a methodology for activating fragmented histories: extracting cadence from silence, finding the beat of resistance within archival remains.
In the Artist's Own Words
Q
How has your multicultural background influenced your artistic perspective and the themes you explore in your work?
I am unsure how my multicultural background has influenced my artistic perspective and themes, because I do not have the distance to objectify myself. I believe an artist's practice develops over time — themes emerge retroactively. If I am too consciously aware of those things, then the work will change, and I am not interested in narrativisation. I am more interested in methodology and assemblage, rather than in the business of storytelling.
Q
Your art often delves into systems of order and the boundaries of mediums. What motivates you to explore these themes?
I find these systems intriguing because their repetition and use make them internalised as truths that go unquestioned. By dissecting language, such as headlines, and reassembling them, I aim to highlight how narratives are constructed and where power resides. The absurdity that arises from comparing these constructs to other lived realities underscores how compartmentalisation operates within capitalist structures. This dissection isn't just an external critique — I acknowledge my own entanglement within these systems, which makes the exploration even more necessary.
Q
Could you share insights into your creative process, from the inception of an idea to its realisation?
A project normally starts with a conversation, and sharing references with the curator or writer. Through those conversations, I start to pull from my archive and look at research. It is very much a research-based practice, a laboratorial practice, in that I let things interact with each other. I will then find a motif from that research to sit within the robust systems I have already established in my practice, that recur — those holding systems. And I see what emergent form comes out of that. A lot of the practice, which isn't seen, is my archive. My work is pulled from that record-taking of invisible histories.
Q
What are your greatest inspirations or influences?
There are too many to state or even to remember. Because I didn't grow up going to galleries, or with art, all the obvious references didn't have a formative effect on me — more than, say, how my father had his own practice which he was unaware of as an artistic practice. I am most influenced by the ways people close to you find reason for living: his being his amateur radio practice, and his calligraphy practice, when chronic illness had compromised his body. Creative ways for people to be connected to other people and to the world. As I came out of art school I went into care work, working with people on the autistic spectrum. That was also a way to find meaning and be with others.
Q
You have participated in exhibitions globally. How do you approach presenting your work in different cultural contexts?
When showing in different regions, each region presents different challenges, and often that challenge, or those limitations, becomes a central element in the work. Censorship is a contingency which exists in every area, in one form or another, and working around that seems to be the crux of the work. How can you use aesthetics to speak of an unsaid? To an extent, each exhibition is an experiment in legibility, legitimacy, and assimilation — the feedback that comes from that then feeds the next project. And sometimes things don't work out. I use my father's and my uncle's calligraphy without even knowing what they say. That in itself is a risk I often take.
Q
What challenges have you faced in both your artistic and personal journey, and how have they impacted your work?
I think the whole practice has always looked at issues of censorship, adaptation, assimilation, legibility, and legitimacy. That being said, it has gotten a lot worse recently — since October — so I have to amplify these strategies. Historically, my work has always smuggled in these obfuscated histories, and now I have to use other devices and abstractions, or subtractions, to deal with the current moment, where things that once could exist are now seen as inflammatory. Certain subjectivities and certain existences are seen as inflammatory, which is a very sad state of affairs. Nonetheless, this is nothing in comparison to the people being burned alive.
The Artist as Archivist, Disruptor, Witness
Beyond the White Cube
El-Sayegh's practice underscores the vital and ever-more-urgent role of the artist as disruptor, archivist, and witness. Through her immersive installations and meticulously constructed works, she challenges the assumed neutrality of traditional exhibition spaces and the perceived stability of received historical narratives. Nothing in her work is inert; every surface is an argument, every material a position.
By weaving personal and political fragments together — her father's calligraphy whose meaning she herself does not know, the taekwondo uniform as a form of inherited defiance, the bruised pigment of canvases that refuse to be contained — El-Sayegh not only reclaims space for marginalised stories but prompts deeper reflections on identity, power, and the structures that shape what we are permitted to know, feel, and say.
Her work reminds us that the artist's role goes beyond creation. It is an act of resistance and reimagining: forging connections that bridge cultures and histories, and inviting audiences to reconsider what is seen, what is known, and what is valued. In an era of accelerating censorship and the violent policing of subjectivity, El-Sayegh's practice — quietly insistent, technically rigorous, and morally clear-eyed — feels not merely timely but necessary.
