The Arts Club Dubai in ICD Brookfield Place presents Burning Square, the latest in its rotating Stairway Exhibitions, presentations staged along the Club’s grand staircases. On view on the second floor, the show features striking works by London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh and will be open until October 2025.
The art pieces on display belong to El-Sayegh’s Burning Square series, which probes the intersections of language, culture, and memory. Three large-scale canvases interlace newspaper (most notably the flesh-toned pages of the Financial Times), anatomical drawings, gestural brushstrokes, and fragments of personal as well as cultural archives.
Through layered grids, the works expose the instability of meaning in times when archives are reconfigured, fragmented, or erased to serve dominant narratives. Central to the compositions is the recurring motif of a gold leaf square, borrowed from Chinese ancestral ritual, which El-Sayegh reimagines as a symbol of both protection and erasure.
About the artist
Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Selangor, Malaysia) is a British-Malaysian artist of Palestinian origin who earned her BFA from the University of Westminster (London) in 2007, followed by an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009.
Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance, sound, video, and diagrammatic forms. It is built on an investigation into material and language, as well as the construction and breakdown of systems of order. The artist often creates collages combining text, textiles, found imagery, and newspapers, layered with latex, rubber, and clay. Hand-painted grids and geometric patterns recur throughout her work, reinforcing the shifting possibilities of meaning when information is recontextualised.
El-Sayegh has showcased her artworks in many solo and collective exhibitions, including Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2024; Enfleshing (solo) (Overbeck-Gesellschaft – Kunstverein Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany, 2023); Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond (LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2023); Biennale Matter of Art (Prague, the Czech Republic, 2022); and Words at an Exhibition – an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems (Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea, 2020), among others.
El-Sayegh’s accolades include being shortlisted for the Prix Jean François Prat (2023) and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2017). Her art pieces have been acquired by major public collections such as LACMA, Tate (UK), and Kadist (France), to name a few.
To get more information about Burning Square, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in visiting New Western Views (Preview) by Marwan Bassiouni.
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