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.





Tenderness in the City
 Home-cinema screening program
Beirut and Montreal
2024-Ongoing
Tenderness in the City is an artist-run home-cinema program that gathers people monthly for screenings and conversations on spaces of care, intimacy, and connection across Beirut and the SWANA region. Hosted in living rooms and studios, the series treats tenderness as an everyday force that persists amid conflict and uncertainty, and as a way of thinking about how we live together. 

The project continues as an ongoing platform at @tendernessinthecity.

© 2026 Elias Nafaa Montréal / Beirut