Elias NafaaAbout Index
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 was a 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Fellow with the Canada Council for the Arts. His work has been presented at the Institut du monde arabe (Paris), Galerie Tanit (Beirut), and Manif d’art – Québec City Biennial, with a forthcoming presentation at MUZEU in Braga, Portugal. His work is held in the collections of the Institut du monde arabe  (Donation Claude & France Lemand), Dalloul Art Foundation, and Beirut Museum of Art.





First Chapter from a Tidal City Video essay in development
Venice, Italy
2025-ongoing
Initiated during my 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Fellowship (Canada Council for the Arts), this first chapter begins from Venice as a city calibrated by tides and by the systems built to anticipate them. Moving between flood barriers, warning signals, and museum care protocols, the project is being developed as a video essay that examines how “protection” is staged across infrastructure and daily life. It asks what these mechanisms keep safe, what they expose, and when care begins to resemble control.

© 2026 Elias Nafaa Montréal / Beirut