In conversation with Hélène Yamba-Guimbi & Joyce Joumaa

To mark Mudam's 20th anniversary, two conversations will be held with Hélène Yamba-Guimbi and Joyce Joumaa, whose works feature in the exhibition Video Killed the Radio Star. The 1980s and their Cultural Echoes. Hélène Yamba-Guimbi will join Alexine Taddeï, co-curator of the exhibition, in conversation, while Joyce Joumaa will speak with fellow co-curator Caroline Honorien. The curators will dig into each artist's practice and invite them to reflect on their respective approaches. More than a chance for the public to get to know the work, the sessions will open up a space for dialogue around the exhibition's themes through a closing Q&A. 

Video Killed the Radio Star: The 1980s and their Cultural Echoes speaks to the Mudam Collection’s deep affinity for the 1980s. Revisiting the decade and tracing its reverberations into the present, the exhibition brings together more recent practices to ask how the upheavals of those years still shape our own. Its focus is on the geopolitical and media turbulence of the late 1980s—from the fall of communism to the first stirrings of globalisation—a moment when the very notions of centre, periphery, and margin began to blur. Joyce Joumaa and Hélène Yamba-Guimbi both turn to the crises thrown up by that acceleration. Joumaa reads Lebanon's chronic power cuts as one more chapter in a crisis reaching back to the Lebanese Civil War, and further still to the country's colonial past. Yamba-Guimbi’s sculptures, in turn, probe the technological systems that breed new forms of violence and isolation, set against the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids on immigrant communities in Los Angeles. 

Biography

Hélène Yamba-Guimbi (b. 1995) is an artist based in Paris. She studied at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy (France) and in the Department of Critical Theory at the California Institute of the Arts (United States). She has held solo exhibitions at Tonus, Paris (2025) and at Room_3557, Los Angeles (2026), and her work has featured in group shows at the Frac Lorraine (2026), the Fondationd'entreprise Pernod Ricard (2025), Paris Internationale (2024), and the Brooklyn Museum (2023). Her texts have been read at the Centre international de poésieMarseille and the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris. 

Joyce Joumaa (b. 1998) is a Lebanese-Canadian visual artist and writer based in Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. She studied film at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work has been shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennale, and the 35th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, with recent solo exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Plein Sud Centre d'exposition, and the Eli Kerr Gallery. She is a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Emerging Artists and the 2025 Baloise Art Prize.