AD INTERIM - Guest Curator Yasmine Helou

Ad Interim is a collective exhibition at Hope 93 Gallery, bringing together the works of ten female artists around an imagined archaeology of a time and space that perhaps never were. Rather than pursuing a linear narrative, the artworks of Zahra Bundakji (Saudi Arabia), Ava Binta Giallo (Guinea–Germany), Loulou Siem (UK), Anjalee Malan (India–UK), Meredith Gunderson (USA), Marya Kazoun (Lebanon), Sejal Parekh (India–UK), Nouf Alhimiary (Saudi Arabia), Alexandra Jabre (UK–Lebanon), and Hannah Scott (UK) lean into a metaphysical investigation of traces—visible and invisible, organic and synthetic—that linger or vanish across shifting terrains and temporalities, both environmental and architectural.

At its heart, the exhibition interrogates the blurred thresholds between reality and invention, authenticity and simulation, the historical and the speculative. Conceived between a finished space, a construction site and a storage unit, it weaves together a tapestry of changing tales composed of fragments of a history not yet written, or perhaps long forgotten. The works on display function as unearthed relics from imagined futures or distorted pasts, prompting a reconsideration of what we accept as memory, artifact, or truth. As put by Diderot “We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.” This exhibition takes that metaphor to heart, inviting artists to craft installations that are both deeply rooted in, and resisting, their own temporal and spatial contexts. The aim is to explore and challenge the rigid dimensions in which we conceive human experience, and to examine how these constructs are influenced, if not dictated by socio-economic realities. “Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.” – Primo Levi. In this sense, this collective poetic-artistic endeavor intends to demonstrate the consciousness Levi is referring to. In doing so, the works open up speculative spaces where memory becomes a fluid and fallible process. Memory evolves, distorts, absorbs. The installations thus act as poetic vessels of this instability, inviting the viewer to experience memory not as a record, but as a living, breathing phenomenon shaped by context, perception, and time.

In this light, Ad Interim, aims to highlight the multiple possibilities of narrating and reading facts and feelings, and understanding tangible and intangible landscapes. For Milan Kundera the “struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, it is an almost impossible venture, a very human tragedy, that positions humanity between amnesia and grid...

Yasmine Helou (b.1996) is an Italian-Lebanese curator and cultural projects manager based in Venice. Helou’s approach to curating is characterized by an emphasis on cross-cultural dialogue and a commitment to fostering dynamic conversations on the fluctuation of sense (in all its senses). She pursued her undergraduate studies at ICART in Paris, gaining experience in art galleries and museums such as The Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. In 2018, she completed a Master’s in Curatorial Practice at IED Venice and is currently enrolled in the MA Curating Contemporary Art program at the Royal College of Art in London.  In 2019 she worked as assistant curator for the National Pavilion of Malta at the 58th Venice Art Biennale and contributed to the DK Zattere Curatorial Lab of the V-A-C Foundation. In 2018 Helou co-founded a.topos, a curatorial collective based in Venice, where she served as co-founder and curator until 2021. In 2021, Helou took on the role of head of exhibitions and events at Venice Art Projects, curating and organizing a series of exhibitions and cultural events aimed at revitalizing abandoned spaces in Venice’s Castello district. In an attempt to reconsider space and time, she is particularly interested in working site-specifically in unconventional venues, collaboratively with the artists. Through the tensions between subject and object, sum and substance, architecture and nature, daydreaming and active engagement her curatorial endeavours aim to question the static understanding of meaning, while prompting novel readings of tangible or intangible landscapes; whether political, cultural or historical, personal or universal. Helou’s curatorial work extends internationally, with involvement in projects a cross Mexico City, Athens, Beirut, London, Paris, and beyond. Recent curatorial projects include Substance en Désordre, Vie Projects, Paris (2025), BETWIXT, BEYOND & UNBOUND, Casa Gilardi, Mexico City (2025), and Zapatos Rojos, San Marco, Venice (2024). 

Alexandra Jabre (b.1985) is a Lebanese-British figurative artist living in London. Born in France to Lebanese parents and having lived in the UK and the USA, she is a multi-cultural and multi-faceted artist, attentive to the complexities of human connections beyond dualistic views. Jabre uses watercolour, gouache and acrylic paint in her practice about consciousness and energetic ties between humans to create images of deep connection to invisible forces, hidden realms, love and sexuality. She graduated from Brown University in 2007 and obtained her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2017. Jabre recently returned from a residency at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland, and is currently working on her forthcoming second solo exhibition with Galerie Analix Forever.

Nouf Alhimiary (b.1992) is multidisciplinary artist, writer and researcher whose work returns to the body as a site of memory, absence and transformation. Working and collaborating through installation, sound, photographs, virtual reality, inherited objects, ritual, hair, sound and text, she explores themes ranging from feminine embodiment, speculative memory, techno-poetics and affect. She is currently completing a PhD in Culture at University College London, and she was a visiting researcher at Yale University, affiliated with both the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department.

Loulou Siem (b.1992) is a British multidisciplinary artist. Her practice is grounded in sculpture, and expands through textile and video to interrogate the domestic, the architectural, while considering how story-telling, archives, and function affect systems of value and power. Siem completed her BFA at The Ruskin School of Art in 2015. She worked as studio manager in 2016 for painter Harold Ancart before establishing her own studio and exhibiting internationally. In 2024 she embarked on her MFA programme at The Royal College of Art where she is currently studying sculpture. Solo shows of note include Structure of Stand-Alone Monuments at Boca CDMX in Mexico City (2024), A Pregnant Woman Wishing Her Child to Be Beautiful Must Look at Beautiful Objects at The Pawel Susara Museum of Modern Art in Bucharest (2019), and The Showdown II at The Goldfinger Factory, London (2018). Her work has been featured in significant group exhibitions, including The Worm at the Core at SET, London (2022), SinkingScapes at Venice Art Projects (2021), Fight or Flight at The Columbia by Roman Road Gallery, London (2020), and Mark Shand’s Adventures and His Cabinet of Curiosities at Hauser & Wirth, London (2018). Additional exhibitions include Babele at Spazio Musa, Turin (2023), Watershed Projects at The Fitzrovia Gallery, London (2021), and Manovra at Castello 2432, Venice (2022), in collaboration with the collective La Méditeraneé.

Sejal Parekh (b.1979) is a British-Indian cross-disciplinary artist whose practice operates as a cartographic intervention into the geographies of liminality, where materiality emerges as a delicate negotiation of contested narratives and deeply inscribed memory. Through site-specific installations, video, and sound work, she excavates the intricate topologies of hiraeth, a diasporic condition that transcends mere nostalgia, instead articulating a radical reimagining of spatial and cultural inhabitation. Emerging from an intricate understanding of parallel world systems, where cultural dynamics are not merely observed but performatively dismantled. Parekh's aesthetic strategy constitutes a fundamental archaeology of gesture: she recuperates and transforms objects, motifs, and performative actions historically deployed to marginalise and stratify, transmuting them into nuanced instruments of critical refusal.

Marya Kazoun (b.1976) is a Lebanese-Canadian artist based in Venice,Italy. She completed degrees in Interior Architecture and Fine Arts at the Lebanese American University. In 2001, she moved to New York and completed an MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts. She is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practices mainly consists in installations and performances, and is often a combination of the two. Her constant search for extreme beauty in her works led her to explore an array of different materials. Every work has its own narrative and is a story deriving from Kazoun’s personal journey, from her childhood memories and cultural background. She explores and plays with the concepts of time and space by blurring their boundaries.  Her visual forms are drawn from poetically elaborated unconscious collective imagery and references, transforming her materials by giving them nobility, new life, and new meaning. She has taken part in several group shows and solo shows internationally, including the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005 with a solo show entitled “Personal Living Space.” Among the institutions that have hosted her work include, among others, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art of Klagenfurt (2006), the Sharjah Biennial 8 (2007), the World Economic Forum in Davos (2008), the Poznan Biennial in Poland in (2008), and the 53rd Venice Biennial (2009). She represented the city of Venice at the 54th Venice Biennial (2013). Her works have also been included in several group exhibitions at the Fondazione Berengo, the Boca Raton Museum of Arts in 2017 and 2020, and at the State Hermitage Museum in 2021. Her installation Long Winter is currently on view in the Italian pavilion at the current Architecture Venice Biennial.

Hannah Scott (b.1980) is British multidisciplinary artist who draws on a childhood in rural Devon, with a chalky palette as a nod to the St. Ives group. Primarily a sculptor, but also with a practice in printmaking, photography, film and painting. In sculpture, a variety of materials include steel, bronze, porcelain, textiles, and readymades.  Classical forms such as drapery and figuration are used to explore contemporary narratives. This practice conveys a deep understanding of life. Aesthetics masks a difficult story that is empathetic to the imperfections of existence. It is fascinated by the continuation between life and not life. Hannah Scott graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 2022 with distinction. She will receive her MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2025. She has exhibited in several group shows in London Galleries and UK Sculpture Parks. Her work is held in many important private collections.

Meredith Gunderson (b.1976) is a London based American artist. Her multidisciplinary practice draws from complexities, voids and limitations within systems and hierarchies of knowledge. Often extrapolating from catalogued museum and library collections and responding to the sensorial experiences of built environments, Gundersons’ work proposes abstracted, talismanic objects and fragmented narratives open to a range of symbolic readings. Meredith’s research embedded practice explores how knowledge and experience acquired through the body and through esoteric and spiritual inquiry intersect with more traditional frameworks of understanding. Working with a range of material including ceramic, silver, bronze, textiles, 3D printing, casting, animation, pastels on silicone, Meredith’s forms and surfaces are a hybrid of bodily, organic and ritualistic with the synthetic, industrial and digital. Her distinctive pale palette and frequent inclusion of layers, transparency and reflection contribute to the phenomenological and ephemeral qualities of her sculptural language. Meredith holds a BA in History of Art from the University of Colorado, a BA in Ceramics from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and is a currently undertaking an MA in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art.