Otra Orilla / Another Shore Group exhibition featuring Mandy El-Sayegh
Presented during Abu Dhabi Art, Otra Orilla (Another Shore) presents new perspectives in visual art on the connections between Latin America and the Arab world, featuring works by Emilia Estrada, Alia Farid, Francisca Khamis Giacoman, and Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, as well as a new commission by Mandy El-Sayegh.
Rather than a survey or historical approach, the show brings together contemporary artists who open windows into the flows and exchanges between these two regions. Often reflecting on diasporic experiences, they map landscapes and historical narratives, weaving personal and collective memory. Through moving image, textile and installations, the artists explore how shared political and poetic imaginaries underpin the parallels and intersections between Latin American and Arab contexts.
Mandy El-Sayegh has created a new installation, Psychic Self-Defence. The work uses the methodology of assemblage, which is central to El-Sayegh’s practice, in order to make reference to the act of bodies assembling in solidarity or protest. Assemblage also operates here through the gathering of scraps of forgotten histories and marginalised identities, and symbolically reinserting them into a cohesive, if fractured, whole.
El-Sayegh’s immersive installation is composed of layered canvases covering the gallery walls, along with a video work, constructed by the artist from range of fragments, which is projected onto a painting.
Interrupting the field of the projection is a mannequin, dressed in garments created by El- Sayegh to be worn at solidarity protests. The pieces recall martial arts uniforms, referencing the popularity of practices such as taekwondo in the 1970s by Palestinians, including the artist’s father. Motifs of symbolic protection are blended throughout the installation with those of physical self-defence.
The body subjected to violence, and the body engaged in acts of solidarity, are further motifs which infuse the pieces on view. The process of researching and creating the site-specific installation and video work involved the artist taking research papers suggested by the curators on the history of solidarity movements between Puerto Rico and Palestine. These sources, along with works by Franz Fanon, were used by El-Sayegh in a process of scansion – instinctively selecting words and snippets of text and embedding them into the montage of video imagery, and into the painted and printed surface of the walls.
