Mandy El-Sayegh: Strike, posed Performance at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Depot

Step into Mandy El-Sayegh’s layered world of movement, image and sound with Strike, posed, unfolding inside the Depot.

To mark her solo presentation at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Depot, El-Sayegh presents Strike, posed, performed by the artist and her collaborator, Yuma Sylla. In El-Sayegh’s practice, the moving body is a central element—an active site where images and histories converge.

The performers move in front of a projection screen, their bodies continually intersecting with a shifting flow of imagery and photography of war. As in El-Sayegh’s paintings, these images bring together contrasting visual worlds, placing scenes drawn from fashion and popular culture alongside material that lays bare ongoing conflict. The performance unfolds through a vocabulary of gestures that move between poise and interruption: fluid, expressive movements give way to moments of tension, hesitation and enforced stillness. 

The title Strike, posed holds these contrasts together. It refers both to the stylised poses associated with fashion and dance and conjures the assault of warfare and the violence it enacts to the human body. Through the accumulation of movement, image and sound, the work creates a dense yet intimate environment—one that invites close attention to how bodies carry meaning, vulnerability and resilience within today’s geopolitical and visual landscape.