Artists in residence

Catherine Cattaruzza lives between France and Lebanon, where she has spent most of her life. In 2022, the collapse of Lebanon forced her into exile.

Since 1993, after studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse and obtaining the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique with honours, she has been taking part in solo and group exhibitions in the Middle East, Europe and North America. Her work explores themes around territory, the trace, the fragmentation of political culture and post-war conditions.

In the spring of 1994, Catherine Cattaruzza was invited to take up a residency by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture and became the first post-war artist to work in the public space of Beirut city centre. There she creates ephemeral installations entitled No Man’s Land.

Her work has received support from the Swiss Arts Council, Pro Helvetia.

Her video installation Body was acquired for the permanent collection of the Vehbi Koç Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey (curated by Emre Baycal).

Her most recent works are The Thin Lines Between the River and Me – Geography – Cartography – Photography – Radiography – a photographic series for the Lebanese Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale in Architecture, (curator Hala Younes – 2018) ; Beneath my Skin, Home a permanent installation for the American Hospital in Beirut, (curator Amanda Abi Khalil) and I Can’t Recall the Edges, Biennale of Photographers from the Arab World, IMA Paris (curator Gabriel Bauret – 2019). This series will be presented at the Photo Pavilion of the Art Explora Festival in a tour of the Mediterranean (curators Amanda Abi Khalil and Danielle Makhoul – 2024/26).

The photographic installation I Am Folding the Land was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles in 2022. The exhibition was accompanied by an eponymous book with texts by Ryoko Sekiguchi and Jean Michel Vecchiet.

Catherine Cattaruzza has been photographing Beirut since 1992. Her project “Liban-Israël, l’Infranchissable Frontière” won her an 8-page portfolio in M le Monde, as well as a publication in the reference book “Sur la photographie au Liban” (ed. Kaph). This series on impassable borders is a long-term project on conflict zones and the representation of latent wars.

Her latest project, Where Home lies (2024), developed as part of the “Elles & Cité” residency at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2024), was awarded the DRAC Occitanie’s Aide Individuelle à la Création (2023).

Bertrand Cavalier is a French artist based in Brussels. His work revolves around the notion of space. He investigates the interaction between people and their surroundings, particularly urban surroundings as they took shape in the age of modernism.

Bertrand Cavalier’s work shows, above all, how man and nature move in that built environment and affect it, thereby ‘restructuring’ it. His photographs are more sculptural translations of unique moments than objective documents of social phenomena. The objects and situations that he portrays are often recognizable and ordinary. The close ups used by Bertrand Cavalier reveals, just as his presentation of the photographs does, the inherent structure of his subjects and how, as ‘foreign objects’, they break with the original order. In this way Bertrand Cavalier emphasizes the various aspects of urban planning, including the unintentional, the ‘mishap’, as a quality that allows room for a subjective and personal use of the cities in which we live.

The common thread in Bertrand Cavalier’s artistic thinking is his focus on the idea of ​​the physical sensation, understood as our ability to share ideas and thoughts in ways other than through objective, factual information. Physical sensation is about our inner self and what we have in common. Through our senses, we share “tacit” but significant, universal knowledge.