Letitia Gallery is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by the Egyptian artist Ahmed Badry, whose sculptures and drawings investigate our relationships with familiar objects in order to question their functionality and place in the everyday. Portmanteau will bring together a selection of new and previously seen mixed media works, including six sculptures ranging in size from 50cm to 3.5m, two of which will incorporate 3D printed objects and video projection.

The exhibition is an extension of Badry’s previous work, which has sought to transform our perception of everyday objects through the manipulation of scale and context, and to re-examine the role of the omnipresent object within society. The work offers insight into the artist’s in-depth research into noncodified objects through a reinterpretation of them in relation to language. By upscaling a bus ticket, a tool or a piece of packaging to epic proportion, Badry magnifies the object’s intent and makes the banal unavoidable.

Within Portmanteau, Badry has sought to collaborate with artists, writers and linguists in order to explore multiple ways of deconstructing language through the process of naming. The title alludes to the composite objects created by Badry that exist solely as symbols of the potential of their function – for example, a battery drill connected to a can opener, viewed as a whole, does not exist within the current global vernacular. Badry aims to understand and define these objects through naming and assigning function and, in doing so, create something new, translating the object from a non-verbal hinterland between existence and assigning it relevance to society.