Mia Naja: Ex-Sistere
And performance of BUFFER ZONE by Mia Naja + Corentin Bouby
February 21 - March 14, 2026
Mia Naja
Who bears witness when bodies disappear?
When sediments settle, layers accumulate, and time compresses into matter until fossils are formed. Fossils register gestures, impacts, violence. They hold what history erases, what human memory no longer contains. But how can these vestiges be made to speak? What becomes of the role of an object in times of war? What remains? How can absence be materialized, made tangible?
Ex-sistere brings together objects that are half-ruin, half-myth, creating spaces that resist destruction and erasure. The exhibition situates itself in the aftermath, post-flood, post-cataclysm, where events are no longer visible, yet continue to inhabit matter. It asks how one can carry the weight of reality when justice has not been done.
Through accumulations of sand, olives, and bones, (I) explore narratives that are both collective and intimate. Each piece becomes a site where matter takes the place of departed bodies, where objects stand in for those who are no longer there.
The work does not seek to reconstruct a narrative, but to render perceptible what has settled within it: cracks, displacements, wounds. The installations create places where the gaze rests on what remains, and where the viewer, in turn, is placed in a position of witnessing.
Within this fragmented landscape, (I) seek less for answers than for a way to hold. To exist.
To exist comes from the Latin ex-sistere:
ex — out of, from, beyond
sistere — to stand, to set in place, to make appear
This exhibition resides in the hyphen of ex-sistere. A space, an interstice between
leaving and settling. A condition that echoes (my) sense of home; somewhere between
East and West.
—Mia Naja
ARTIST BIOS
Mia Naja (b. 2001, Lebanon) is a Lebanese artist living and working between Paris and Beirut. She is currently completing her Master’s degree at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and has completed an exchange semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rooted in a personal history shaped by displacement and war, Mia Naja’s practice explores archives, absence, and borders; not only as frontiers between countries, but as thresholds of the body. Working across performance, sculpture, and drawing, she investigates stratification through repetition and accumulation, developing processes that slow down time, allowing her to inhabit it, reclaim it, and trace how memory settles into matter.
Originally trained in architecture at the American University of Beirut, she completed two years of study before her education was interrupted by the 2020 Beirut port explosion, an event that profoundly reshaped her relationship to space, objects, and the speed at which a world can collapse.
Corentin Bouby was born in the south of France and lives and works in Paris. His raw, physically engaged practice explores the tension between body, space, and matter, exposing the porosity that emerges through the trial of contact. Constraints, resistance, and energy collide, revealing the body’s memory, its fragilities, and its limits, while inviting the viewer to confront their own inner tensions.
Trained in high-level classical dance during his adolescence, Corentin later studied urban space and its uses, developing a sensitive approach to the relationships between body, environment, and perception, before fully committing to performance. He is currently an assistant and performer for visual artist Pascal Hachem, collaborating on projects presented in major institutions such as the Grand Palais, the Monnaie de Paris, and the Théâtre de Chaillot. In October 2025, he took part in his first group exhibition, Dissonant Shelter, presented at 229 Lab during Art Basel Paris.
