The printing press, power and politics of Mandy El-Sayegh

“You can step on everything,” says artist Mandy El-Sayegh, pointing to the loft of a former glassworks in south London, where the walls and floors are covered with layer upon layer of canvas, fabric and paper. Red paint accumulates in ominous puddles. Everywhere are silkscreened bits of text. “Sex Attack” jumps red. “Sea Breeze” catches the eye in a color El-Sayegh calls “institutional green.” “I can’t do the job if I don’t have a mess,” she says. “The studio is really like a big brain.”

When we meet, El-Sayegh is preparing for his current show in Tadeo RopacLondon space. “I like to bring the studio into the gallery,” he says of his immersive installations, which often feature collaged walls and floors. “I do not know either [what I’m going to do] until pretty close to the show because I like to work intuitively.” It is a defining year for the artist after her debut at the Chisenhale gallery in 2019. This will be her third solo exhibition of 2023, after one at Lehmann Maupin in New York in April and another in Zurich with the Tichy Ocean Foundation, which continues through November. Later this month, she will open a second exhibition in London, in collaboration with the Algerian-French artist. Kader Attia.

Today, she’s dressed all in black: a tank top, paint-splattered jogging pants, and fluffy black slippers, her mermaid-long hair pulled away from her face. Her studio, the nexus of a practice that spans painting, installation, and performance, sits between her bedroom and a library, “a chaotic archive” packed with floor-to-ceiling inspiration, ranging from anatomy book pages to copies. of the financial timesthat he loves for its “meaty tone”.

“I don’t throw anything away,” he explains. “It’s more like hoarding than collecting.” Materials, or “fragments,” are brought together in a process that she says is “like surgery”: dense assemblages are created, combined, screen-printed, and painted with figurative elements or abstract shapes.

The 38-year-old was born in Selangor, Malaysia. “My mother is Chinese Malay and my father is Palestinian, but they moved here when I was six, so I’m practically a Londoner,” he says. His mother was a midwife, his father a calligrapher (his calligraphy is often incorporated into his work) and later he worked repairing computers.

You can read [my] work in a forensic way, reconstructing my story, or equally you can see it as an abstract painting

After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2011 with an MA in painting, El-Sayegh worked as a carer for young adults with non-verbal autism for five years. “But because of the government cutbacks, the situation became really sad, especially for the users of the service,” she says. “But [that job] It wasn’t good for me either. And that’s when I realized I could only do this.” His works intertwine the subtle and the visceral, the personal and the political, playing with a duality of meaning. “You can read [my] work in a forensic way, reconstructing my story, or you can still see it as an abstract painting,” says El-Sayegh. “I think the fact that I am here – and the fact that my father is from Palestine – is political.

“No matter how transparent it is, there will always be an enigmatic element to the work,” he adds. Nonetheless, he is happy to share the thought processes behind his recurring motifs. The grid that he frequently hand-paints on his canvases is, for example, “a way of holding everything together so it doesn’t spill over. It’s also a very robust motive.” Meanwhile, the repeated text “Sea Breeze” is one of a series of code names for military operations, a specific reference to an Israeli raid on six civilian ships from the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” in 2010.

For Julia Peyton-Jones, Curator and Senior Global Director at Thaddaeus Ropac, the “accumulation of all the references – her personal history, art history, and the world around us – is absolutely fascinating.” She highlights the way that El-Sayegh’s pictorial palette often resembles bruised flesh: “dealing with the bruised elements of the human experience.”

Back in his study, El-Sayegh picks up a medical journal from the floor. “This is an image that I was looking at yesterday; It’s an eye injury. But the colors are so beautiful. It’s strangely pacifying. It provokes less anxiety than an abstract threat.” Among her shelves are also jars of animal parts that she and an ex-partner, songwriter and artist Lily Oakes, with whom she continues to collaborate, used to preserve in formaldehyde. “Focus your energy because you have to be very precise. But I don’t do that anymore.”

In 2020 he suffered a nervous breakdown. “I couldn’t stop walking. So there was no ability to sit down and paint. My work deals with system failure and reconstruction of forms, and I suppose that happened to me in my body and my psyche”.

From this experience, however, a new practice emerged: performance. Your words will be used against you. was carried out as part of frieze 2020 live program. Based on the concept of a mirror, it featured El-Sayegh alongside a number of dancers, including her current collaborator Alethia Antonia, and a soundtrack composed by Oakes. “It’s an exorcism,” she says simply.

His current show at the Tichy Ocean Foundation is titled In session: It is an installation inspired by Sigmund Freud’s office, with cabinets and shelves of objects and an old examination table along with paintings. A sound work, for its part, includes a recording of one of El-Sayegh’s own psychoanalysis sessions. In the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, Freud’s study is the starting point of a “rich red room”, he says. “It will look like my studio, with lots of layers, with paintings on top and rugs on the floor… I want to create a psychic oppressive feeling: the idea of ​​being inside my head.”

Lately you have been thinking a lot about money; about how “painting is like printing money” (one of his Net-Grid paintings sold for £75,600 at Phillips last year), manifesting on his canvases as collaged play money and silkscreened banknotes .

Of her growing success, she says: “It makes me quite paranoid. I thought about changing my name to Mandy Wong, my mother’s name.” But “it feels very meaningful to get some level of visibility for what my parents fought to get us.” [three kids] here… From extreme poverty on my mother’s side, now I am like a bourgeoisie”, he laughs. “Have [my own] place. I go to a psychiatrist. I went to art school.”

When I ask him what he does besides making art, El-Sayegh exclaims, “My God, now I’m going to have to go to my shrink! The last time I stopped making art, it wasn’t good. I don’t really do anything else. It is a blessing and a curse. You are very glad that this is your life, but you do not turn off, do you? Because the job is you.”

interiors is at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, September 1-30, with El-Sayegh Akathisia performing on September 12, ropac.net. A show for two people with Kader Attia is on lehmann maupinLondon, from September 21 to November 4