Artist Bio: Shehab Adel is a London-based photographer and art director whose practice focuses on constructed characters and image-making. His work is rooted in the building of visual worlds. bringing together styling, set design, and atmosphere to produce photographs that exist between reality and fiction. Drawing from fashion, film, subcultures, and folklore, Shehab treats photography as a medium for visual storytelling and world-building. His images explore identity, transformation and the quiet tension between tenderness and decay.

Project Statement: Beautiful Parasite is a solo exhibition by Shehab Adel exploring the destructive mechanics of vanity, self-obsession, and narcissism through a contemporary gothic lens. The work treats the obsession with beauty as a parasitic force, something that slowly consumes whatever it lives inside. Chasing aesthetic perfection does not elevate a person; it hollows them out. Built across staged narrative sets, the project traces different versions of a singular decay, all stemming from the same root: a wanting so relentless that the desire itself becomes the ruin. Moving away from traditional horror tropes, the series explores decay and dark romanticism through a softer, more intimate portraiture.