Shourouk Rhaiem is a French-Tunisian contemporary artist whose practice moves between sculpture, photography and installation, exploring memory, desire, identity and the visual language of consumer culture.
Drawing on family photographs, vintage objects and everyday commercial products, she transforms familiar materials into highly constructed objects that blur the boundaries between the ordinary and the precious.
Central to Rhaiem’s practice is her meticulous use of Swarovski crystals. Detergent boxes, food packaging, perfume bottles, magazines, soft-drink bottles and other ephemeral objects are preserved and transformed through painstaking embellishment.
Removed from their original function, these objects become jewel-like artefacts through which Rhaiem examines how advertising, popular imagery and material culture shape memory, aspiration and our understanding of value.
Her work frequently draws upon the visual culture of her childhood and her French-Tunisian heritage, creating a dialogue between personal memory and collective histories, European and Arab cultural references, mass production and handwork.
Beneath the immediate seduction of colour, light, and crystal lies an investigation into how ordinary objects acquire emotional, cultural, and symbolic meaning.
Rhaiem gained international recognition with Ordinary Life, presented by Swarovski in Vienna in 2018.
Her work has since been shown internationally, including at Milan Design Week, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bangkok, Expo 2025 Osaka, the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, and the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA).
In 2025, her work formed part of Le mystère Cléopâtre at the Institut du monde arabe, an exhibition examining the construction and continual reinvention of Cleopatra’s image across more than two millennia.
