Nelly Ben Hayoun

London-based French visual artist Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is guided by an insatiable thirst for playfulness and transformation, patchwork and the demystification of knowledge. She seeks to ensure her work is within everyone’s reach. A product of her generation and era, she works with whatever she comes across, including by chance. She’s a product of schools, as well: first in Paris, as a textile design graduate at ENSAAMA-Olivier de Serres (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art), and then at the Royal College of Art in London, where she studied design interactions and laid the foundation for her own relational aesthetics, which combines colorful vocabulary with a vivid non-linear narrative steeped in scientific knowledge. Always juggling several projects at a time, Nelly Ben Hayoun invents worlds for entertaining experimentation that draw from her obsessions: family ancestors and independent, universal women (Hannah Arendt and Marie Curie, notably), the moon and the sun, talismanic materials and golden charms, teamwork and mindset. Nelly Ben Hayoun navigates between different universes with the same explosive creativity, from NASA to La Gaîté Lyrique, Singularity University and MOMA.