“This is not reinvention, it’s integration.”

Mariam Haji, also known as Meri Helmi, is a transnational contemporary artist whose practice is rooted in embodied mythology, cultural hybridity, and spiritual reckoning. Born in Bahrain and shaped by a life across geographies in Melbourne, Dundee, Berlin, Paris, and now Finland. She creates from the “third space,” where binaries dissolve and paradoxes become sacred.

Under the name Mariam Haji, her early work emerged from silence and rupture, channeling Arab feminist resistance and the mythological currents of the Gulf. As Meri Helmi, meaning “sea pearl” her work is reborn through the contemplative minimalism of Scandinavian aesthetics infused with Arabian decadence. These are not separate identities, but interwoven voices in a continuum.

Haji/Helmi challenges fixed categories: East and West, feminine and masculine, memory and future. Her practice is an altar, paradox in harmony.

She does not erase the past; she composts it. Through her transcultural artworks and dual-named lens, art becomes a tender act of survival, of beauty, a fluid dialect that speaks without apology.