Kader Attia & Mandy El-Sayegh
Disfigurations
Lehmann Maupin, London

Human beings are apt to seek meaningful patterns in things, with a wealth of research suggesting that the human brain evolved in this way to aid learning and survival. But can the patterns we see be influenced by our education and our history, that is to say, by power? And if so, can they be changed or undone?

In “Disfigurations,” Kader Attia, who partly grew up in Algeria, and Malaysian-born Mandy El-Sayegh experimented with this pattern-seeking instinct, hence why none of the artworks here were labeled, a negation of context that could be interpreted as an exercise in deconstructing the underlying forces—such as capitalism and the colonial gaze—that make up the contemporary world and inform these learned patterns.

At first glance, the two rooms of the exhibition looked like a haphazard collage of squares and grids, with a few mirrored masks propped up on stands in the corners. It became gradually clear that the shapes were a combination of newspaper pages and cuttings and sections of Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930), printed repeatedly across the walls of the gallery. The overarching patterns were a nod to cubism, a movement similarly preoccupied with deconstructing “reality.”