Project Room | Jamil Hellu: In the studio

Jamil Hellu’s exhibition in the gallery’s Project Room, In the studio, features a collection of photographic prints from his ongoing Odyssey series (from 2022 forward); a celebration of queer resilience, endurance, and joy. Through photography as both medium and metaphor, Hellu turns the act of self-representation into an urgent gesture of defiance amid an intensifying political landscape of cultural erasure.

With Odyssey, Hellu transforms the studio into a stage of color, texture, and performance, where material experimentation becomes a strategy of self-construction. The artist’s body appears only in fragments and fleeting traces, an interplay of concealment and revelation that resists the reductive clarity often imposed on queer, immigrant, and racialized identities. Reimagining the art historical motif of the draped figure, Hellu centers queer embodiment and the politics of visibility. Color and materiality replace physiognomy as primary signifiers, offering a kaleidoscopic vision of identity grounded in transformation and fluidity. Suspended between abstraction and figuration, these images present queerness not as a fixed definition but as a continually shifting state of becoming.

Hellu’s practice is deeply informed by his complex cultural background as an American immigrant raised in Brazil within a multicultural family of Arab and Latino descent. This intersectional heritage underscores his sustained exploration of how identity is shaped and performed within familial, social, and political contexts. Through his lens, identity is never static; it unfolds as an evolving constellation of experiences, contradictions, and possibilities.