Material Collisions: Mandy El-Sayegh’s “For Theresa” at Space K Seoul
By Jiwon Yu
The exhibition is loosely arranged into four sections, each governed by a different density. The show opens with El-Sayegh’s signature Net-Grid canvases (2010–) and her new Grand Collection of World Art tableaux (2026), which line walls plastered with newspapers, resulting in an architectural surface that recalls traditional Korean paper doors, which divide space while allowing light and air to pass through. Composed of printed matter that the artist sourced from museum archives, antique book shops, and flea markets in Korea and elsewhere, the walls form an indexical but non-specific backdrop against which the paintings’ compact grids and collaged fragments set different forms of attention in motion: eroticized images instantly—almost involuntarily—catch the eye; letters and notations demand to be read, even when they withhold full comprehension; smudges, drips, and folds keep pulling one’s gaze back to the physical textures.
This unstable overlap is particularly acute in Grand Collection of World Art. The series draws on El-Sayegh’s research into colonial and migrant histories in Korea, whereby she found a secondhand book on “world art” featuring Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 19th-century oil painting Grande Odalisque on its cover. Long absorbed into the canon of Western painting, Ingres’s reclining nude represents two fantasies at once: the naked female form as a readily available object of desire, framed through the voyeuristic male gaze; and the “Orient” idealized as a distant realm defined by Eurocentric perspectives and salacious projections.
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El-Sayegh’s work does not simply speak for marginalized women or articulate the meanings behind these images or marks. To frame it that way risks missing the material friction that keeps the paintings from becoming purely illustrations of a political argument. What matters is not that these remnants are finally made legible, but that they are kept in conversation without reconciliation, inviting multiple, even contradictory readings. “For Theresa” is strongest when it treats the archive not as a place where silenced histories are (re)stored, but as a site where images continue to collide, adhere, shift, and accuse. Even as the works remain infatuating, their visual pull does not dilute the political charge—they keep us looking long enough to feel implicated in its circuits.
