Mandy El-Sayegh: The Showroom Mural Commission 2025–26 A site-specific installation
For The Showroom’s Mural Commission 2025-26, Mandy El-Sayegh has employed a cut-up methodology, layering materials with poetic fragments to explore the textures of commonality, social justice, and modes of resistance. 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 will incorporate fragments from personal and collective narratives. The Showroom’s location, situated off Edgware Road close to Church Street Market, holds personal significance for the artist, who partially grew up and spent her young adulthood in the area. Working with communities based in the neighbourhood, the artist has collected 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.
A soundscape, which can be heard by passers-by, will utilise similar strategies to further metabolise poetic imaginaries. Collected from a vast archive, the sonic fragments are like bodily organs, connecting diverse struggles and emotions.
ABOUT THE MURAL COMMISSION
The Showroom Mural Commission is a unique opportunity for artists to activate the building’s emblematic facade. Once a year, an international artist works in collaboration with members of communities around the Church Street Ward to create artwork for the mural, complemented by public programming that includes a series of community-engaging events and workshops.
