Mandy El - Sayegh in collaboration with Alice Walter, XXX KISS CROSS KILL, Kummelholmen, Stockholm, 10 May – 15 June 2025. Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy of the artist and Kummelholmen, Stockholm.
Kummelholmen presents the first solo exhibition in Sweden by Mandy El-Sayegh. Based in London, El-Sayegh’s practice is rooted in assemblage, and executed in a wide range of media, including densely layered paintings, sculpture, and installation, as well as performance, sound, and video. Her works investigate the formation and break-down of systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic, or political.
For this exhibition, El-Sayegh has invited artist Alice Walter to collaborate in a presentation which incorporates audio-visual works and a body of new, large-scale, paintings by El-Sayegh, unfolding throughout Kummelholmen’s sprawling post-industrial space. In XXX KISS CROSS KILL, both artists consider the power embedded in images, and in the technologies which create and disseminate them, using the aesthetics of the breakdown of systems of image-making, processes of collage, endless loops and altered sensory states.
El-Sayegh’s recent works – complexly layered paintings – incorporate images of violence which have been widely disseminated through digital media within her own adult life. For El-Sayegh, these images speak to the simultaneous over-visibility and lack of representation, or agency, of subjects in states of duress. Images are reproduced interminably through both formal and informal media, and yet their subjects remain powerless and often nameless. The endless reproduction of images of violence in our contemporary moment has a deadening effect; while the quality of images progressively degrades, stories are lost, forgotten, or suppressed within dominant narratives.
El-Sayegh embeds repeated silkscreened renderings of the photographs into her densely layered canvases, which use physical collaged fragments in combination with acrylic and oil paint, in compositions that consciously evoke the gridded forms of modernist abstraction.
Among El-Sayegh’s paintings, Alice Walter’s video works can be seen projected onto translucent fabric screens. These pieces, created by manipulating the recording process of VHS cameras, share their collage-based methodology and layered compositions with El-Sayegh’s paintings. Walter intervenes in the electromagnetic transfer between capture and playback, disrupting the electronics of the camera, incorporating multiple light sources, lenses, colour gels, internal TV text/science manuals, and her own body into dispersed visual fields in order to destabilise attention, shifting between focus and dissolution. Selecting VHS, a defunct format, and intentionally further degrading the images produced, Walter shares in El-Sayegh’s interest in the mutability of images as they are repeatedly reproduced and distorted, forming a wider investigation between the two artists of breakdown—of material, of the image, and of wider symbolic systems.