Mandy El-Sayegh In Session
Tichy Ocean Foundation presents In Session the first solo exhibition in Switzerland by Mandy El-Sayegh. Spanning Tichý Ocean Foundation and Wasserkirche, Zürich, the exhibition features large-scale paintings, sculpture, and multi-media installation, and includes new works made by El-Sayegh responding to the exhibition spaces and to the archive of Miroslav Tichý.
El-Sayegh’s installation in Tichy Ocean Foundation reimagines the consulting room of renowned neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. This thematic thread, also hinted at by the exhibition’s title In Session, connects to the context of the exhibition, which is situated within an active psychology and psychotherapy practice.
El-Sayegh incorporates objects such as an antique examination couch, as well as Persian rugs and a shelf displaying antiquities, mirroring the ‘Oriental’ objects which fascinated Freud. El-Sayegh assembles these objects, each of which is loaded with its own histories and embedded power-relations: be it in the consumption of ‘exotic’ commodities; the position of power taken on by the clinician; or the architecture of authority behind the culturally dominant forms of knowledge which underpin our society.
On view in the gallery spaces are new works by El-Sayegh, all of which are informed by her own interest in psychoanalysis, which forms a key part of her artistic research. One element which constantly recurs in El-Sayegh’s work, across its many media, is the idea of symbolically attempting to re-incorporate disparate fragments into a coherent whole. This can be seen in her densely layered paintings, and the works which spread across the walls and floor of the gallery.
