Elias Nafaa is an  artist, architect, and researcher working between Montréal and Beirut. Through sculpture, moving-image essays, and archival interventions, he examines how infrastructures of protection can mirror the very violence they claim to avert. Navigating the fragile line where acts of care tip into coercion, Nafaa translates states of emergency into charged material and narrative forms.

A graduate of Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, he is part of the Public Programs team at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and a 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Fellow (Canada Council for the Arts). His work has been presented at Galerie Tanit (Beirut) and the Institut du monde arabe (Paris), with a forthcoming presentation at Manif d’art, Québec Biennale (Québec City). It is held in the collections of the Institut du monde arabe (Donation Claude & France Lemand), the Dalloul Art Foundation, and the Beirut Museum of Art.





Memory-Scape No. 3 Installation
Abroyan Factory, Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon
2022

Video mapping on paper, 3D-printed artifacts, wood ashes. 2 × 3.5 × 3 m.

Memory-Scape No. 3 imagines a future in which one’s native landscapes have disappeared, and memory becomes the only remaining link to them. Remembrance is partial and subjective, shaped by distance, yet it is all that is left.

Through video mapping on paper, 3D-printed fragments, and wood ashes, the work proposes a landscape built from projection, residue, and reconstruction. As viewers move through the installation, they encounter a memory-scape as an alternative realm and a possible record for the future.

Presented as part of Imagine That Tomorrow, a group exhibition of the CATAPULT.visual’arts programme presented within the IN BETWEEN Festival by the British Council in Lebanon, Abroyan Factory, Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon.

© 2026 Elias Nafaa Montréal / Beirut