Mandy El-Sayegh’s practice is rooted in assemblage. Executed in a wide range of media, including densely layered paintings, sculpture, installation, diagrams, as well as sound and video, El-Sayegh’s works investigate the formation and break-down of systems of order, be they bodily, linguistic or political. Drawing from a wide range of research and reference material, El-Sayegh incorporates pop cultural imagery, scientific diagrams, commercial packaging as well as objects from her personal archive, decontextualising the familiar to create new meanings. El-Sayegh characterises her works as being preoccupied with ‘part-to-whole’ relations and with the formation of subjectivity - how fragments can be unified to a coherent whole. El-Sayegh lives and works in London, where she received a BA in fine art from the University of Westminster in 2007, followed by an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Her first solo institutional show, the specially commissioned installation Cite Your Sources, was held at London's Chisenhale Gallery in 2019. Her work has also been shown internationally, and in 2022, her work was featured in the British Art Show, the largest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK, followed by her participation in the Biennale Matter of Art, Prague. She also took part in the performance festival MOVE 2022: Culture club - Corps collectifs at the Centre Pompidou, presenting her piece En Masse in collaboration with choreographer Alethia Antonia and composer Lily Oakes. Two works by the artist, Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing) (2020) and Floor (aka 'Figured Ground') (2020), were acquired by the Tate for their permanent collection in 2022 with funds provided by Simon Nixon and family.
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Over the past two decades, Cassel Oliver has organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed ‘Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970’ (2005); ‘Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art’ (2012) and major survey exhibitions for Donald Moffett, Benjamin Patterson, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen. Her debut at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was the critically acclaimed retrospective ‘Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen’. Most recently, she opened the groundbreaking exhibition, ‘The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse’ (2021) that toured nationally.
Dr. Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, lecturer and ‘Chanel Curator for the Collection’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. From 2016 to 2020 she was a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department UCL and a member of faculty at Sotheby’s Institute, London. Previously she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where she co-curated ‘The World Goes Pop’ (2015), and was responsible for ‘Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs’ (2014), ‘Paul Klee: Making Visible’ (2013) and ‘Ruins in Reverse’ (2013). She is the author of Pop Art and Women Artists both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021).
