Jana El Kurd

Jana El Kurd is a self-taught artist who was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon and currently lives in Montreal, having moved to Canada in 2017.

She began painting three years ago, in a move that marked a journey of self-discovery career and a career change away from interactive media design and videography.

El Kurd’s work is focused on the deep-rooted connections she has to the histories etched into the landscapes of her childhood. Working with plaster and pastel tones, she reimagines memories of buildings that have borne the brunt of turmoil, conveying with sensitivity their seemingly irreconcilable fragile beauty and muted defiance. There are elements of innocence, harking back to the artist’s girlhood, with a little magic enduring in these long-lost places. And yet these are in fractured form.

El Kurd’s practice is intentionally unpolished and instinctive, enabling each work to come to fruition on its own terms. She uses stark contrasts and vivid textures in an attempt to untangle the contradictions of being human - a push and pull between joy and melancholy that feels both unbearable and necessary. Her work leans into this tension, not to resolve it but to hold it up to the light.

“My art practice, a chaotic, tender interrogation of what it means to feel too much all at once, obsesses over the friction between vulnerability and resilience, and somehow always leads me back to the absurdity of love,” she said. “It’s less of a declaration and more of a vulnerable offering.”

El Kurd currently paints, plasters and tiles to support herself. “It’s felt like a full circle in many ways, especially since plaster has been my main medium in art long before I ever stepped onto a job site. Somehow, it all ties together,” she said.