Art & Culture · Paris
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In October 2025, Roham Shamekh showed three monumental artichoke-flower seats at Design Miami.Paris, inside a house Karl Lagerfeld once used as his private Left Bank salon. It arrived five months after his bronze ashtrays first asked whether the Earth resonates with the human heart, and two months before a full room built on that same question filled a booth in Miami. Self Love is the part of that year most easily missed, and the part that explains what the other two were building toward.
Introduction
Self Love, the installation Roham Shamekh showed at Design Miami.Paris from 21 to 26 October 2025, comprised three monumental seats shaped as artichoke flowers, cast in ceramic and a proprietary resin, their layered petals scaled up from a kitchen vegetable into something closer to sculpture. It was staged inside L’hôtel de Maisons, an eighteenth century mansion at 51 Rue de l’Université in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as part of the fair’s third Parisian edition. “The act of sitting is never passive for me,” Shamekh has said of the work. “When you settle into these giant artichoke flowers, you turn inward, you reflect, and from that quiet space, transformation begins.”
Taken alone, Self Love reads as a striking but self-contained gesture, an everyday pouffe reimagined as surreal botanical sculpture. Taken as part of the year Shamekh actually had, it is something more specific: the middle instalment of three works built around the same conviction, staged five months after a set of bronze ashtrays first tested the idea in Los Angeles, and two months before a full room in Miami scaled it up into an entire environment. Reading Self Love on its own misses what it is actually doing, which is answering a question the other two works asked in different registers.
Where this sits in a year of asking the same question
In July 2025, Shamekh showed Earth Magma, a set of bronze ashtrays embedded with four stones standing for earth, air, fire and water, at the inaugural group show at So-Too gallery in West Hollywood. The work posed a specific proposition: that the Earth’s electromagnetic frequencies might resonate with the human heart. It was a small, held-in-the-hand object asking a large question, offered as a meditative lens rather than a scientific claim.
Five months later, at Design Miami’s twentieth anniversary edition in December, that question became R O O T S, a four-part collection anchored by a hand-carved ceramic sofa and a soundscape tuned toward the Schumann resonance, the Earth’s own 7.83 Hz electromagnetic pulse. Where Earth Magma asked the question in miniature, R O O T S built an entire sanctuary around answering it, treating the four pieces as limbs of a single organism rather than separate objects.
Self Love sits between those two moments chronologically and, it turns out, conceptually. Where Earth Magma worked through the elements and R O O T S worked through ecological networks, roots that interlace underground and communicate without being seen, Self Love works through a different natural structure entirely: a flower built almost entirely out of defence. That shift matters. Across one calendar year, Shamekh moved from asking whether the planet resonates with a person, to asking how a whole practice might grow from that resonance, to asking, quietly, what it actually takes for a person to let anyone reach the tender part of themselves at all. The three works are not variations on a theme so much as three different organs of the same body of thinking, and Self Love is the one that turns the question inward rather than outward.
The materials carry that continuity too, and this is easy to miss without reading the three works side by side. R O O T S’s hand-carved sofa was cast in ceramic and epoxy resin, finished white, built to look excavated rather than manufactured. Self Love’s three seats are cast in ceramic and a proprietary resin as well, the same working pairing carried from the Miami sofa into three individual chairs in Paris, five weeks earlier on the calendar even though R O O T S is the piece that reached a wider audience. Shamekh was not simply repeating a formal language between the two cities; he was using the same physical vocabulary to make two different emotional arguments within the same season, which is a harder thing to pull off than developing two unrelated techniques would have been.
Why Roham Shamekh chose the artichoke
An artichoke is, structurally, an argument about protection. A tough, layered exterior of scaled leaves surrounds a soft, edible heart, and reaching that heart means working through the defended layers first, one at a time, each one slightly less tough than the last. Botanically the plant is even a flower bud rather than a true vegetable in the culinary sense, harvested before it opens, which makes Shamekh’s choice to scale it into an open, blooming seat a deliberate departure from the plant’s own natural state: he is showing the artichoke at the exact moment it would ordinarily be cut short, mid-transformation rather than closed.
That structure maps directly onto the piece’s stated concept. Sitting inside the seat means physically occupying the position of the artichoke’s own heart, surrounded by the same layered petals that, on the real plant, exist to keep that heart hidden. Shamekh’s language, settling in, turning inward, reflecting, transformation beginning from that quiet space, is not a separate idea bolted onto a striking form. It is a description of what an artichoke’s own structure has always done, applied to a human body instead of a vegetable one. Few of Shamekh’s earlier pieces state their own mechanism this literally; Self Love is unusual in his output for how exactly the form and the concept are the same claim.
A house built around private reinvention
L’hôtel de Maisons has its own long history of exactly the kind of protected interiority Self Love is built around. The mansion was built in 1706 by the architect Pierre Cailleteau, known professionally as Lassurance, and purchased the following year by Claude de Longueil, Marquis de Maisons, who gave it its name. The Soyencourt family acquired the property in 1732 and commissioned a fresh interior by Pierre Mouret, giving the house its alternate name, Hôtel de Soyencourt, and the Corsican noble Pozzo di Borgo family then held it from 1836 until 2010, the same family whose story later inspired the film The Intouchables, portions of which were shot inside the building.
Its most recognisable modern association, though, is Karl Lagerfeld, who rented rooms on the building’s second floor for decades and used them as a private salon for Left Bank gatherings, a curated, semi-hidden world set inside a very public address. A designer’s work about the effort it takes to reach someone’s protected, tender centre, staged inside a house whose defining modern use was exactly that kind of guarded private world behind an eighteenth century public facade, is a stronger pairing than most fair placements manage, whether or not it was chosen deliberately.
Design Miami Paris, three years in
The fair itself has moved past its debut. Design Miami.Paris launched in October 2023 as the brand’s first French edition, and by 2025 had reached its third year, running from 21 to 26 October with more than two dozen international galleries showing collectible design spanning the early twentieth century to the present. Fair director Jennifer Roberts described the event as having settled into the Parisian landscape while staying fresh, which is a fair description of the context Self Love appeared in: not a debut needing to prove itself, but an established fair mature enough to give a single installation room to make a quieter argument than the trade-floor norm.
What the design argument actually is
Read together, Shamekh’s 2025 amounts to a complete anatomy of introspection built from three different natural structures. Earth Magma used the four elements and a planetary resonance to ask whether the outside world and the human body might be listening to the same frequency. R O O T S used the underground network of roots to argue that design itself could function as a living, interconnected system rather than a set of discrete objects. Self Love uses the artichoke’s defended architecture to ask the most specific version of the question yet: not whether resonance exists, and not whether a practice can grow like an organism, but what it actually costs a person to let their own guarded centre be reached. Furniture that only had to look striking would have stopped at the first idea. Shamekh built three, in one year, each one narrowing the question until it arrived somewhere genuinely personal.
Frequently asked questions
What is Self Love?
An installation by Roham Shamekh comprising three monumental seats shaped as artichoke flowers, cast in ceramic and proprietary resin, shown at Design Miami.Paris from 21 to 26 October 2025.
Where was Self Love shown?
At L’hôtel de Maisons, 51 Rue de l’Université, Paris, an eighteenth century mansion in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as part of Design Miami.Paris’s third edition.
How does Self Love relate to Roham Shamekh’s other 2025 work?
It sits chronologically and conceptually between Earth Magma, a set of bronze ashtrays shown in Los Angeles in July 2025 that first asked whether the Earth’s frequencies resonate with the human heart, and R O O T S, the full room-scale installation Shamekh showed at Design Miami in Miami that December. Where those two works used the elements and root networks respectively, Self Love uses the artichoke’s protective structure to make a more personal version of the same argument.
Why did Shamekh choose the artichoke specifically?
An artichoke’s structure is built around protection, tough outer leaves defending a soft, edible heart. Shamekh’s concept, that sitting is an act of turning inward toward transformation, maps directly onto that plant structure rather than being a separate idea applied to it.
What is Design Miami.Paris?
The Design Miami fair brand’s Parisian edition, launched in October 2023 and now in its third year as of 2025, showing collectible design from more than two dozen international galleries.
What is the history of L’hôtel de Maisons?
An eighteenth century mansion built in 1706 by the architect Lassurance, later home to the Soyencourt and Pozzo di Borgo families, and known in recent decades as the site of Karl Lagerfeld’s private Left Bank salon.
Final thoughts
It would be easy to read Self Love as the smallest of Shamekh’s three 2025 works, a single striking installation between two more heavily covered moments. It is closer to the opposite: the piece where the year’s actual argument becomes explicit rather than implied. Earth Magma asked the question in an object small enough to hold. R O O T S built an entire room to answer it. Self Love, staged quietly inside a house built for exactly this kind of guarded intimacy, is where Shamekh finally said what all three were about all along.
This piece is part of a three-part series on Roham Shamekh’s 2025 practice. Read the first chapter, Earth Magma: Roham Shamekh’s Bronze Ashtrays and the Question That Became R O O T S, and the final chapter, Roham Shamekh’s R O O T S at Design Miami 2025.
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