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.





ImpulsionsSolo Exhibition
ArtLab, Beirut
2022

Photo by Laetitia Hakim
Photo by Laetitia Hakim
Photo by Laetitia Hakim
Photo by Laetitia Hakim
Photo by Laetitia Hakim
Crayons on paper, 100 × 1000 cm roll.

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.

© 2026 Elias Nafaa Montréal / Beirut