ART-PRESENTATION: Mandy El Sayegh-Protective Inscriptions

In her paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations and videos, Mandy El-Sayegh creates layered anthologies of found text and images from a variety of sources. These include newsprint, advertisements, aerial maps, anatomy books and her father’s Arabic calligraphy, which take on unexpected new meanings through proximity. Set adrift from their original contexts, these fragments become open to multiple readings that are personally, socially or politically determined and undermine the supposed objectivity of language and media. Moving between material, corporeal, linguistic and cultural frameworks, El-Sayegh highlights the constant flux of meaning that is shaped by environment and individual experience.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

For her solo exhibition, “Protective Inscriptions”, Mandy El-Sayegh has created a skin of unstretched canvases that wraps the walls of the gallery, overlaid with a new suite of “Net-Grid” paintings. A continuation of the artist’s ongoing “Net-Grid” series that begun in 2013. El-Sayegh works with silk-screen print directly onto canvas to create a surface for a layered painting process, overlaid with hand-painted grids. The grid acts as a schematic that attempts to contain the fragmented debris of the words, images and materials that circulate throughout El-Sayegh’s work. In other works, bodies appear in disconnected forms—reproduced from sources ranging from consumer-media and pornography to anatomical textbooks—exploring the construction of the self as fragmentary and incomplete. Central to the exhibition is a series of vitrine works in which objects and images are assembled, mirroring the layered process also visible in El-Sayegh’s paintings. Here, the limits of a surface, or boundary, are highlighted, questioning how acts of categorisation are constructed and upheld. Drawing on the Buddhist idea of the nine stages of decomposition, El-Sayegh infuses each painting with interstices and flesh-like pigment that represent an ambiguous process, the direction of which (towards healing or towards decay) is deliberately obscured. Here, El- Sayegh’s grid becomes a protective sheath, a girdle holding the damaged tissue of the body together. In one painting, “Net-Grid (Pratisara Dharani)”, El-Sayegh draws on traditional Buddhist woodblock prints, which were often printed on rice paper and worn on the body as a talisman for protection. This work is composed of layers of blue, red, and green pigment, combined with silk-screened images of a Buddhist print, the artist’s father’s calligraphy, Financial Times articles, muslin, and surgical gauze. The subtitle, “Pratisara Dharani” refers to the specific woodblock print that appears throughout, featuring the eight-armed Bodhisattva Mahapratisara in the centre surrounded by the dharani (Buddhist mantra), 33 ritual objects of esoteric Buddhism, mudras, and Bodhisattvas on lotus pedestals. The soundscape, chalk, is inspired by Buddha Machines, small portable chanting devices used to aid in prayer and meditation. A collaboration with composer Lily Oakes, chalk layers sounds from disparate sources. It pulses through the body, activating a vibration that engages the senses in the act of looking, observing, and experiencing. The work is composed of ambient and industrial sound, bells, electronic music, and chanting. The layering process in chalk echoes the material and historical layering of El-Sayegh’s practice, in which she weaves together dislocated fragments from her own history, crafting them into an organic system, or body. The visual and auditory compositions in Protective Inscriptions deliberately confuse any defined order or interpretation. El-Sayegh leaves analysis open, remaining mindful of the potential for systems of categorization to tip over into prejudice or violence, or lead to the pathologization of difference. Indebted to the anti-taxonomical and the nonsensical, El-Sayegh’s Protective Inscriptions creates a space where dominant modes of meaning-making can be broken down and reimagined.

Photo: Mandy El-Sayegh, transliterated cut script (detail), 2021, Oil and mixed media on silkscreened linen, 57.48 x 61.42 inches / 146 x 156 cm, Photo: Damian Griffiths, © Mandy El-Sayegh, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Duration: 20/5-17/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com