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.





Eulogy to my Roots: Prelude
Video2022


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).

© 2026 Elias Nafaa Montréal / Beirut