Mandy El-Sayegh, Burning Square (Double page spread #5) (detail), 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas with collaged and silkscreened elements and joss paper, Diptych, 227 x 147 cm (each). Photo: Eva Herzog Studio Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery , London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul.
For her upcoming mural commission at The Showroom, London—on view from 25 September 2025 to September 2026—Mandy El-Sayegh deepens her long-standing engagement with language, memory, and materiality. Installed in the heart of a neighbourhood that holds personal resonance for the artist, the project draws on both archival and community-based practices to explore the aesthetics of resistance, solidarity, and abstraction.
El-Sayegh’s mural commission layers sound and material to explore the textures of solidarity movements. Assembling scraps of forgotten histories, the artist questions whether aesthetics can be used as a bridge for communication. Key to her investigation is the question: how can aesthetic freedom exist without political freedom? And who has the right to abstraction?
Drawing on a wide range of sources, El-Sayegh incorporates fragments from personal and collective histories. The project will be developed by working with communities connected to the Showroom. Situated off Edgeware Road, the location has personal significance to El- Sayegh, who partially grew up, and spent her young adulthood, in the area. The artist will work with local participants to collect slogans, imagery and poetry to be re-assembled as elements in the mural. This process of assemblage spans the artist’s practice, where shreds of information with no immediate association are transformed into a coherent, if disjunctive, whole.
An immersive soundscape which can be heard by passers-by will utilise the artist’s cut-up methodology to further metabolise poetic imaginaries. Collected from a vast archive and within the environment of the commission, the sonic fragments are like organs, connecting diverse struggles, political ideologies and emotions to wider solidarity networks, or bodies.
August 2, 2025
