Soup is delighted to participate in our first art fair, Art-o-rama Marseille 2025, with a solo presentation of new works by Alia Hamaoui. Hamaoui (b.1996) is a British-Lebanese artist living and working in London, UK. Her practice spans spatial configuration, sculpture, print and media, employing processes of (de)attiring/(de)upholstering/(de)skinning/(un)adorning/(de)constructing. Interested in the role of attire as the interface between a person and their political spatial realities, she often merges allusions to everyday liminal architecture with materiality or forms that are supposedly opposed – where the generic meets the culturally specific, the corporate meets the arable, the past meets the present. 

Presented at Art-o-rama, Hamaoui’s work is continuation of her exploration into how the construction of cultural heritage within the nation state structure has reduced the past to an alienating formulaic rotation of the copied-and-paste portrayals. Presented as a semi-public changing room space, scenery and imagery fluctuates between the generic and the specific, where trompe-l’oeil, life-scaled compositions feature a combination of stock imagery, commonplace fixtures, surrealist veneer and faux crocodile leather textures, contrasted against distinct depictions pertaining to the authentication and repatriation of artefacts from the USA to Lebanon.