At our Suite du Huit in Paris, during Photo Days, we create a dialogue between the photographic worlds of Toufic Beyhum and Selma Bella Zarhloul. Through portraits, signs and symbols each seeks to reveal what lies beyond appearances - somewhere between memory, intimacy and the invisible.

With Echoes of the Fenjan, Toufic Beyhum draws on the memory of his Damascene grandmother, who used to read coffee grounds. His black-and-white portraits are paired with cup readings performed by a fortune teller in Turkey. Between photography and divinatory ritual, the face and the signs left by the coffee open up a space where spirituality and a sense of the future come together.

In resonance, Selma Bella Zarhloul presents Still Bodies, a body of work rooted in a long- standing engagement with the body through dance and theatre. She observes how it transforms through light, movement, effort or surrender, seeking to express the body in a different way. Her gaze focuses primarily on the male body, explored at the closest level of sensation and skin. Created during long sessions in very low natural light, her images decontextualise the body until it reaches a state of surrender in which “the truth of the body” appears.

Brought together at La Suite du Huit, these two projects offer two ways of reading the human being: one through the face and signs, the other through skin and fragments. Two approaches that invite us to look beyond what is immediately visible.