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.
La Chambre blanche, Québec City, Canada
Upcoming - February 28 to April 19, 2026
Venice, Italy
Dongola Limited Editions, Beirut
Text by MK Harb. Captions by Elias Nafaa. Series editor-in-chief: Raafat Majzoub. Research and editing: Elias Nafaa.
The third installment in the Dongola Architecture Series, the book reads Bernard Khoury’s practice through Beirut’s contradictions, using his work as a lens on the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of urban storytelling.
Distributed internationally through Les Presses du Réel.
More information: Dongola Limited Editions
Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), Lebanon
Villa Audi Mosaic Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (December 11, 2025 to February 24, 2026)
Unfolding Landscapes is the inaugural exhibition of BeMA’s Ambulant Arts program, an itinerant format that circulates works beyond the museum’s walls. Inspired by the Sandouk el-Ferjeh and cabinets of curiosities, it unfolds through mobile display units and invites viewers to reconsider landscape as a cultural, scientific, and historical construction. Organized around four themes (geology, flora, skies, and human natures), it brings works from the Lebanese Ministry of Culture’s collection into dialogue with new commissions.
Nafaa’s Conversation with the Strata (in collaboration with Yara Mahdi) examines restoration through geological thinking, using scientific and conservation imagery to trace how damage, neglect, and repair accumulate like layers. Working from paintings by Moustafa Farroukh and Georges Guv, the project moves between evidence and substitution, and asks how decisions of care shape what is preserved and what is allowed to disappear.
Beirut and Montreal
The project continues as an ongoing platform at @tendernessinthecity.
Galerie Tanit, Beirut
In July 2021, a wildfire reached Andaket, my native village on Lebanon’s northern border. Like many, I have known my town from afar, tied to the land through my grandparents and a handful of childhood memories. In September of that same year, my grandfather passed away, severing the ties I had left to this place.
Amid this double loss, and through a period of grief, I was consumed by the guilt of no longer being able to care for the land. Both anchors had dissolved, and I found in myself a sense of freedom away from my roots.
Is that freedom worth its price?
Today, Lebanese youth are facing an unprecedented wave of emigration as a way to cope with the country’s ongoing socio-economic collapse. In searching for stability away from home, and in letting go of their anchors, a sense of detachment takes hold.
Eulogy to My Roots questions these layers of loss and the legitimacy of this path toward freedom. In the form of artifacts carved in cedar wood and covered in white paint, it commemorates a journey shaped by detachment and return.
As the work moves between uprooting and return, freedom is measured against what it costs to leave. If physical anchors disappear, can one ever let go, or do roots return as memory?
Three-channel video installation, looped, 4 min.
In July 2021, wildfires reached Andaker, my native village village. The loss was more than a landscape. Amid the collapse of my country, I return to these layers of grief to name them, and to understand what it means to detach, to leave, and to risk not returning.
Eulogy to My Roots is an attempt to speak to that rupture.
Published in Ambit 248: The War Issue, co-edited with Dongola Limited Editions in collaboration with the Catapult program of the British Council Lebanon.
The video was launched alongside the issue at Rough Trade East (London) and Station (Beirut).
Abroyan Factory, Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon
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.
ArtLab, Beirut
Created during a period of forced stillness and solitude, Impulsions began as a coping gesture that externalized an internal state. Initiated in early 2021, the work unfolded as a continuous, impulse-driven process over the course of a year, allowing thoughts, feelings, and anxieties to register on paper without aiming to fit established modes of representation. The exhibition presents a fragment of this flow, tracing drawings made between January and March 2021 and translating the act into space.
Presented as part of CATAPULT.visual’arts, with the support of the British Council Lebanon.
Institut du monde arabe (IMA), Paris
280 × 280 × 300 cm.
At a time when the West is often framed as a horizon of stability for many younger people, how do we relate to cultural heritage when it becomes entangled with conflict?
This project reflects on Lebanon’s damaged and displaced heritage. It deconstructs the song Layali al-Uns fi Vienna, performed by Asmahan* in 1944, reducing its lyrics to a continuous flow of letters. The song carries the identity of the Arab world while fantasizing about Vienna, the capital of Austria.
Traces of Time points to cycles of destruction and reconstruction, and materializes loss as a form, an image, present yet increasingly discarded within contemporary life. Viewers are invited to walk around the work as the letters come into focus, distort, appear, and disappear. The shifting legibility echoes the way cultural heritage evolves, moves, vanishes, and resurfaces.
More than 1,000 letters in the installation are individually handmade and hand-sewn in resin, emphasizing touch, labor, and material presence, and underlining the idea that heritage is produced by people.
* Asmahan is widely regarded as one of the great singers of the Arab world, and the song’s longing for Vienna becomes a lens on aspiration, displacement, and cultural escapism.
Presented as part of Lumières du Liban: Art moderne et contemporain de 1950 à aujourd’hui at the Institut du monde arabe (IMA), Paris.