Catherine Cattaruzza

Catherine Cattaruzza is an artist who works in photography, installation and video. She divides her time between Lebanon and France. Her subjects are territory, the trace, post-war conditions, the falsification of national identity and the splitting of political culture. Some of her installations combine video, sound and photographs with raw materials such as salt, stone, gas bottles and rusted iron. Since 1992 she has also built a photographic body of work on Beirut.

In spring 1994 a residency from Lebanon's Ministry of Culture led to No Man's Land. These ephemeral installations of pigment, coarse salt, stone and gold leaf stood in downtown Beirut. Suite en série (1998) set video and sound beside 17 gas bottles and fire. Karaoke (2002) sets road shots of Lebanon's borders to the national anthem on a loop and invites the viewer to sing. Body (2004) is a four-channel video installation built from a 35mm film she found in 1992 in downtown rubble. More than 17,000 of its frames were scanned one by one. Uncrossable Frontiers, Lebanon-Israel (2016) records the border on film whose expiry date matched the start of the July 2006 war.

She trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse and received the DNSEP with the jury's congratulations. Pro Helvetia commissioned Karaoke for Schlachthaus Theater, Bern (2002), and Body for Beirut Cinema Days (2004). Body was shown in Montreal (2006) and acquired by the Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul. In 2018 she made a photographic series for The Place that Remains, Lebanon's pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture. That year she also made three light boxes for the American University of Beirut Medical Center collection. I Am Folding the Land (2022) was shown in Port-de-Bouc for Les Rencontres d'Arles (2022), in Milan (2026) and solo in Beirut (2026).