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.
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.