Mandy El Sayegh: Body Promise In Art Basel Parcours 2024

Mandy El-Sayegh, ‘Body Promise', Art Basel Parcours, 10 – 16 June

Parcours Night, Wednesday 12 June, from 8 to 11pm

Mandy El-Sayegh presents a programme of new performance works created for Art Basel Parcours, drawing on sources including prayer rituals, trance-states, and the circulation of images in news-media. Performances take place within El-Sayegh’s immersive installation, situated in two unused units in Clara Shopping centre.

El-Sayegh often creates all-encompassing environments within her exhibitions. For Parcours, the spaces – one a former hair salon, the other an empty restaurant – are transformed by layered materials, including paintings, newspapers, canvas, paint and latex, covering their walls and floors, with video and sound works adding additional layers of perception.

The artist has worked with choreographer Alethia Antonia and movement artist Yuma Sylla, both of whom she has collaborated with in recent years, to create a new work for multiple bodies, which will activate the exhibition space. Bodies weave through kaleidoscopic video projections, created by El-Sayegh through ‘collaging’ fragments of news footage, high fashion ad monitors, studio process and informal videos captured by the artist on her phone. Audio for the performances has been created by composer Lily Oakes, who has worked with El-Sayegh to create a sound piece which, like all of the multimedia works brought together here, uses methods of collaging to bring together fragments from disparate sources to create a united, if disjunctive, whole.