CATAPULT Visual Arts Residency Scotland

We are pleased to announce that Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop are partnering with British Council Lebanon and Hospitalfield House on a residency programme to offer the opportunity for two artists from Lebanon to participate in a four-week residency in Scotland between 8 August and 5 September, 2022.

The residency is one of many components of CATAPULT.visual’arts, a talent and professional development programme that starts with a 5-day training and culminates into a series of 10, 3-weeks solo exhibitions for the participants. Congratulations are in order for Elias Nafaa and Laetitia El Hakim who have been selected through the limited open call. 

Elias Nafaa is an artist living and working in Lebanon. His artistic practice is informed by his background in architecture, it looks into space as a place of storytelling. His process-driven approach explores language and issues of identity. Through artworks and projects he developed, his work sheds light on the political through the personal; it is highly subjective, often non-linear, and spatially nuanced. His work has been featured at MACAM, and Galerie Tanit (Lebanon). In 2021, he was the youngest artist selected to exhibit at Lights of Lebanon: modern and contemporary art from 1950 to today at the Arab World Institute IMA in Paris (France). In 2022, he presented his first solo exhibition Impulsions at ArtLab (Lebanon) with the support of the British Council. His work is part of the permanent collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the IMA. 

 

Laetitia El Hakim is a multidisciplinary visual artist who studied Architecture, Photography, and Dance. Laetitia explores socio-political dynamics that affect the way Lebanon and its culture are shaped through an anthropological perspective. She is pursuing not only the role the territory plays in shaping us, but also the cultural aspects of what it means, more specifically through the notions of rituals, memories, and history. Her practice often takes performative and storytelling aspects in its execution, oscillating between reality, fiction, the occult and the fantastic. She formed a duo with Tarek Haddad in 2019. Their work has been shown at Galerie Tanit, Lebanon (2021). She had a residency at Diaphane pôle photographique x Frac-Picardie, France, as part of the program “NAFAS” by the French Institute (2021). She was also selected by the “Catapult-Visual Arts” program (ArtLab x The British Council) to develop her first solo exhibition in 2022.