Sourcebook Mandy El-Sayegh and Helena Hunter Curated by Renan Laru-an
27 January, 2022
– 6 March, 2022
Wednesday – Saturday, 12pm-4pm
LUX & LUX Online
Waterlow Park Centre, Dartmouth Park Hill, London N19 5JF
Sourcebook is an exhibition of re-search impulses by artists Mandy El-Sayegh and Helena Hunter through their conceptual, material, and structural coincidences. In moving image form, it compiles aesthetic output in the layering of surfaces that can be experienced as cuts and transitions, aural notations in speech and poetry, or paratextual excess of found objects and frequencies.
Sourcebook reveals the ongoing show-and-tell between El-Sayegh, Hunter, and curator Renan Laru-an in their attempt to create art during a crisis of reunion. When commonly used tools in research have foisted incommensurability on context specificity, they accessed historicised content by reassembling linguistic markers that produce newly disambiguated texts for reading. The collaboration finds itself in the margins of analytical script as it disappoints source materials, such as archival data and field reports, from the tradition of close reading.
What becomes available on the screen are ectoplasm and fascia, scrying and scanding, signals and traces fabricated to illuminate the strange attraction in old surfaces, haunted punctuations, unbound chapters, and disappearing specimens. Turning the pages of this sourcebook is a sequence of fleshing out in which image and voice, subtitles and illustrations, the analog and the digital are introduced into the film’s frame by many, different hands. Each scribal contribution recomposes the previous embroidery; every mark made anticipates the range and depth of imagination that blossoms in elaborating the first inscription. The coupling of things and gestures—the repetition of form in self-satisfying styles, the incompleteness of content in suspended investigations—integrates the incongruences of historical-research time into contemporary artistic stitches.
Binding El-Sayegh’s and Hunter’s appendices in Sourcebook recovers the collapse of the contextual in the informational. The exhibition transmits the pressure of parapraxes in the organs of cultural connection, once a scalable and representative context to work with. After the artist’s touch, all secondhand references can build their own improvisations that are willed to frustrate contact and initiate misadventures in our relationships: A cult-in-interstice to be had in a regime of juxtapositions that never fulfilled their promises.
Sourcebook is made possible through the British Council Connections Through Culture with additional support from UCL Anthropology.
OFFLINE EXHIBITION: LUX Library, Waterlow Park Centre
Sourcebook is on view at the LUX Library from 27 January to 3 March 2022. Open: Wed-Sat, 12-4pm
ONLINE EXHIBITION: LUX Online
In conjunction with the physical exhibition Sourcebook will be streaming on the LUX website from 27 January to 3 March 2022. Watch Sourcebook here
Mandy El-Sayegh has a highly process-driven practice rooted in an exploration of material and language. In her paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations, and videos, El-Sayegh creates layered anthologies of found text and images.
Set adrift from their original contexts, these fragments become open to multiple readings that are personally, socially or politically determined and undermine the supposed objectivity of language and media.
In 2021/2, her work features in The British Art Show, the largest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK. Solo exhibitions of El-Sayegh’s work have been organised at the Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Bétonsalon, Paris, France (2019); Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2019); Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong (2019); The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico (2018); and Lehmann Maupin, New York, US (2018).
Helena Hunter works at the intersections of visual art, poetry and performance. Her artworks utilise critical poetic and performative modes in relation to environmental change and biodiversity loss, often blending sites such as the field, lab, gallery, archive and museum. She has a Master’s in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her current exhibition Falling Birds is on display at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London. Helena has a collaborative practice, Matterlurgy, with sound artist Mark Peter Wright.
Helena has presented her work at Delfina Foundation, Gazelli Art House, Tate, Gasworks, Arts Catalyst, ICA, Ambika P3, The Showroom, V22, IMT Gallery, Barbican Art Gallery, [space], Art 13 Art Fair, DAM Projects, Raven Row Gallery, (London); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Newcastle), Tramway (Glasgow), MIMA (Middlesbrough), HIAP Frontiers of Retreat (Helsinki), Jerome Zodo Contemporary (Milan), Bòlit Contemporary Arts Centre (Girona), Lydgalleriet (Bergen), Rogaland Kunstsenter (Stavanger), Forum Schlossplatz (Aarau), OFF COURSE Art Fair (Brussels), ArtVerona (Verona), City of Women Festival (Ljubljana). Her poetic writing is published in MAI Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, SomethingOther, Reliquiae and in the publications Posthuman Ecologies edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall and The Midden edited by Jenni Nurmenniemi and Tracey Warr.
Renan Laru-an is a researcher based in Sultan Kudarat, the Philippines. He creates exhibitionary, public, and research programs that study ‘insufficient’ and ‘subtracted’ images or subjects at the juncture of development and integration projects. Ongoing projects include But Ears Have No Lids (2021) and Promising Arrivals, Violent Departures (2018).
Since 2017 the Public Engagement and Artistic Formation Coordinator at the Philippine Contemporary Art Network, Laru-an has (co-)curated exhibitions and festivals, including the 6th Singapore Biennale, Singapore; A Tripoli Agreement (2018), Sharjah Art Foundation; The Artist and the Social Dreamer (2017), Forecast Festival at Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin; the 8th OK.Video – Indonesia Media Arts Festival, Jakarta; and the 1st Lucban Assembly, Quezon, amongst others. He is a curator of the 2nd Biennale Matter of Art, Prague and Curatorial Advisor to the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh.
Laru-an edited Writing Presently (PCAN, 2019), an anthology of art writing on the Philippines today.
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