Space K Seoul is pleased to present For Theresa, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985), on view from March 19 to June 21, 2026. Drawing on her multicultural background and the perspective shaped by occupying a position outside dominant cultural narratives, the artist has developed an archive-based practice that incorporates strategies of collecting and editing. Through this approach, she examines how institutional and classification systems we often take for granted have historically determined what is included and excluded. El-Sayegh’s work materializes this critical inquiry through her distinctive method of collecting and rearranging dispersed images and fragmented texts. The exhibition features a range of works from across her career which reflect the breadth of her artistic practice, including a new body of paintings, and site-specific works created for Space K Seoul. These works create fissures into seemingly rigid established orders and propose the possibility of new narratives.
Central to El-Sayegh’s research-driven practice is an investigation into how systems of knowledge and pedagogy are translated into visual form across different cultural contexts. For this exhibition, the artist conducted research in Korea, visiting museums, second-hand bookstores, and flea markets to collect a range of printed materials, including historical maps, calligraphy, and banknotes. Through the archival processes of collecting and editing these materials, El-Sayegh examines how material traces have contributed to the formation and maintenance of power. Throughout the exhibition, fragments of knowledge—maps, books, and printed matter—intersect with the artist’s personal records, summoning individual memories that have been obscured within grand narratives.
The exhibition title, For Theresa, references the Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982). El-Sayegh draws inspiration from Cha’s seminal work Dictee, in which fragmented language and memory are woven together to recount the histories of women whose voices have often been marginalized. Just as Cha assembled scattered fragments of language to record voices that history has overlooked, El-Sayegh employs a process of layering and suturing—overlapping collected materials and visual elements—to reveal the stories of individuals often omitted from official records. Through this method, archival fragments are transformed into sites where suppressed narratives re-emerge. Cha’s work resonates with El-Sayegh’s methodology of assembly and reassembly, and her influence is one of the many references present in the multi-layered works.
Dispersed throughout the exhibition space is the Net-Grid series, an ongoing body of works since 2010. This series encapsulates the core of El-Sayegh’s artistic practice, where the artist silkscreens collected materials, found objects, and various texts onto the surface before overlaying them with a hand-drawn grid that structures the composition. Within this framework, the net operates as a device for capturing dispersed fragments of images, while the grid functions as a signifier of structural rigor and historical order rooted in the tradition of abstract painting. By deliberately layering and destabilizing the formal conventions, El-Sayegh exposes the underlying tensions and instabilities embedded within seemingly orderly records. In this context, the grid operates as a conduit for information as well as a veil that obscures the material beneath.
El-Sayegh’s practice begins with a distinctive archival approach that involves collecting and reassembling fragmented records. The exhibition introduces a library, a visual representation of this process, while referencing chaekgado. Within this library space where visitors can sit and spend time, materials reflecting the artist’s key areas of interest—including maps, medical texts, and art history books—are brought together, revealing the processes through which knowledge and information are selected, ordered, and displayed. Particularly notable is Metabolism (2026), a display case reminiscent of those found in public museums, which presents items used by the artist in the process of creating the exhibition. Resembling an altar, the work touches on ideas of ritual and offering in many guises, where the abject is transformed into the venerated. In this context, these materials reclaim individual narratives once obscured within grand narratives, bringing them into dialogue with the present.
Personal experience and memory form important motifs in El-Sayegh’s work. The installation Psychic Self-Defence brings together painting, video, garments, and text in a spatial environment. Within this work, the artist juxtaposes the historical solidarity between Puerto Rican and Palestinian liberation movements with her father’s personal recollections of martial arts. In the 1970s, martial arts—including Taekwondo—were at times embraced in Palestinian communities as symbolic practices of collective solidarity and self-defence. A mannequin dressed in martial arts uniforms, installed within the exhibition space, is a visual representation of protection and resilience. Alongside these elements are writings by poets and radical thinkers who spoke out against oppression, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Drawn from different times and geographies, these texts come together within the installation, situating personal memory within a broader historical and political framework.
The series Grand Collection of World Art extends the multi-layered linguistic experiments that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha explored in Dictee into visual form. The work originated when El-Sayegh encountered a book titled Grand Collection of World Art in a Korean second-hand bookstore, featuring Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque on its cover, which is silkscreened onto the painting. Reflecting on the trajectory through which a canonical French Neoclassical masterpiece could travel to a second-hand bookstore in Korea, El-Sayegh exposes the hierarchical structures embedded within Western-centric art history. By enlarging the figure’s gaze, she transforms the female subject from a passive object of observation into an active agent of the gaze. Within the composition, reproductions of Western painting intermingle with the formal fragments of Hangul, generating a new image. In doing so, El-Sayegh’s approach resonates with Cha’s methodology in Dictee, where fragmented records and images are woven together to construct alternative narratives.
The latex installation laid across the floor transforms the exhibition space into a vast skin-like surface. Sheets of newspaper cover the ground, which are coated with a thin layer of latex, forming a fragile membrane across the space. El-Sayegh’s use of latex is inspired by memories of her mother, who once worked on a rubber plantation. As the latex dries, it contracts and discolors, evoking the vulnerability of the human body and its susceptibility to injury. The daily news—ephemeral by nature and quickly replaced by the next day’s events—becomes sealed beneath the thin latex film, forming another layered surface within the installation. Traces of the body also emerge in the White Grounds series. While the canvases, coated in white gesso, appear to be entirely erased, faint impressions of underlying images and texts gradually surface through the painted layer. Soft tones of pink and blue rise slowly beneath the surface, resembling bruises underneath the skin. Here, white is not a void but rather a site where multiple images and memories remain sedimented in overlapping layers.
The latex installation laid across the floor transforms the exhibition space into a vast skin-like surface. Sheets of newspaper cover the ground, which are coated with a thin layer of latex, forming a fragile membrane across the space. El-Sayegh’s use of latex is inspired by memories of her mother, who once worked on a rubber plantation. As the latex dries, it contracts and discolors, evoking the vulnerability of the human body and its susceptibility to injury. The daily news—ephemeral by nature and quickly replaced by the next day’s events—becomes sealed beneath the thin latex film, forming another layered surface within the installation. Traces of the body also emerge in the White Grounds series. While the canvases, coated in white gesso, appear to be entirely erased, faint impressions of underlying images and texts gradually surface through the painted layer. Soft tones of pink and blue rise slowly beneath the surface, resembling bruises underneath the skin. Here, white is not a void but rather a site where multiple images and memories remain sedimented in overlapping layers.
At the far end of the gallery, forming a visual horizon for the exhibition space, stands a nine-meter-high wall covered in layered canvases that span across the entire surface. In these works, El-Sayegh intersects historical maps of Korea with modern cartographic material, overlaying them with her characteristic grid structure. Through this process, the artist invites viewers to reconsider the notion of borders we have long accepted as fixed and standard. Images of banknotes appear throughout the compositions, positioned alongside maps as semiotic markers of value circulating within global networks. By repeatedly incorporating structured media such as maps and banknotes—materials embedded in everyday life and historical systems across the world—El-Sayegh reveals the possibility of complex interpretations that resist reduction to a single meaning.
In this exhibition, Mandy El-Sayegh brings to light voices obscured within systems of order through processes of collection and recontextualization. Weaving together fragmented records and narratives through her unique methodology of suturing, the artist reconnects disparate existences. Rather than imposing a single, rigid definition, the work gestures toward safeguarding wounded histories and mending severed relationships. Through El-Sayegh’s archival practice of gathering and assembling visual fragments, the exhibition invites us to reconsider the complex relationships between the individual and society, and between people and the system that shape them.
Born in Malaysia, Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985) currently lives and works in London. She received a BA from the University of Westminster, London in 2007 and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2009. El-Sayegh has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, London (2019) and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2025). Her work has been included in major group exhibitions such as the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023). Her works are in the collections of Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Sharjah Art Foundation, among others.
Space K is an arts and culture sharing space established by the Kolon Group in Gwacheon in 2011. In September 2020, it expanded and reopened as 'Space K Seoul' in Magok-dong, Gangseo-gu. As part of Kolon’s unique arts and social contribution program, Space K Seoul has been providing exhibition opportunities for emerging Korean artists and mid-career artists who deserve to be reappraised. Space K Seoul strives to expand the foundation of contemporary art by holding exhibitions for international artists who have not been introduced in Korea and offering support for artists to sustain their creative practice.