Mandy El Sayegh’s newly commissioned immersive installation, The Campaign, is presented as part of the 5th Bangkok Art Biennale, Angels and Mara. Curated by Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda alongside Adulaya Hoontrakul, Rémy Jarry, Melanie Pocock and Kulapat Yantrasast, the Biennale brings together artists whose practices engage with the contradictions and complexities of contemporary life. Within this context, The Campaign offers a meditation on the circulation of images, ideas and systems of power, bringing disparate visual and cultural references into collision.
At the centre of the installation is a constellation of new paintings drawing on the visual languages of temples, luxury interiors and commercial destinations. These spaces, variously associated with spirituality, aspiration, consumption and spectacle, become a framework through which El Sayegh examines how desire is produced and directed. Across the works, imagery drawn from advertising, news media, archival sources and popular culture is layered through painting and silkscreen, creating dense compositions in which individual images resist isolation from the visual field.
This process of accumulation and fragmentation is central to El Sayegh’s wider practice. Working across painting, sculpture, installation and mixed media, she draws upon an expansive archive of found imagery and materials, bringing together references from political history, popular culture, architecture and the visual languages of commerce. Rather than treating these sources as fixed, she reconfigures them into new relationships, exposing connections between seemingly disparate systems and narratives. Her works become layered sites where histories overlap, conflict and remain partially concealed.
El Sayegh’s sustained interest in the mechanisms through which images acquire meaning is closely connected to her examination of power and representation. Her practice considers how cultural narratives are constructed through the production, circulation and repetition of images, and how certain histories and identities become visible while others are marginalised.
In The Campaign, the surfaces of luxury, commerce and spectacle exist alongside fragments of political and social history, creating a tension between attraction and unease.
The title The Campaign further extends these concerns, evoking both the language of advertising and that of political and military mobilisation. It suggests the coordinated production of desire, belief and action, and points to the ways in which images can operate as instruments of persuasion. El Sayegh counters the singular narratives of such campaigns with a multiplicity of references, allowing different histories and perspectives to coexist in a state of productive tension.
This approach also informs her engagement with histories of cultural exchange and Orientalism. Drawing on visual languages associated with Asia and the Middle East, El Sayegh examines how places, cultures and identities are transformed into images for consumption, and how these representations continue to shape contemporary visual culture. Rather than positioning herself outside this image economy, she works from within it, appropriating and manipulating its codes. Advertising, archival imagery, news media and decorative motifs occupy the same visual plane, destabilising the boundaries between historical record, commercial fantasy and cultural representation.
The resulting installation reflects a central proposition of El Sayegh’s practice: that images are never neutral. They carry histories, ideologies and desires, and their meanings shift according to the contexts in which they appear. Through accumulation, repetition and juxtaposition, The Campaign creates an immersive environment that is at once seductive and unsettling, inviting viewers to look beyond the surface of images and consider the cultural, economic and political forces that shape what we see, desire and understand.
