Mandy El-Sayegh: The Campaign Bangkok Art Biennale 2026

Mandy El-Sayegh is one of the commissioned artists to feature in the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB 2026).

Angels and Mara, the theme of BAB 2026, explores dialectical opposites between the realms of goodness and the undesirable. 

For BAB26, El-Sayegh has created the immersive installation The Campaign. New paintings are situated in a constellation drawing on traditional temples as well as luxury interiors and shopping destinations. The walls are covered with canvases in warm, rich tones – paintings-in-progress which have news stories, archival imagery and advertising silkscreened within their layers.

The title The Campaign alludes to marketing, but also to military campaigns – incursions through force, drawing attention back to the reports of historical and contemporary violence which leak through the seductive surfaces of her works. 

Always interested in the shaping of power-relations, desire, and flows of information, El-Sayegh’s work considers the historical and current consumption of exoticised aesthetics of Asia. She is interested in the possibility that the associative logic of orientalism can be used to interweave or re-insert things which are being obfuscated. In the complex layers of her work viewers can find allusions to solidarity movements and fragments of marginalised histories.