NAVA MESSAS WAXMAN
Nava is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada, and is of Moroccan-Judeo Amazigh descent, born in the Negev desert of Israel. Nava earned her MFA in Visual Arts at York University, where she is now a current doctoral student in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design.
Her practice moves across performance, drawing, photo-based media, moving image, and installation, examining the intersections of body, technology, and time through a lens shaped by diasporic subjectivity. Emerging from lived experiences of cultural hybridity and migration, her project-oriented practice merges performative approaches and subject-based research with both traditional and technological visual methods. Her work positions the body as a site of archival resonance, where memory, displacement, and ritual converge, and where personal and collective histories are recorded, inscribed, transmitted, and reassembled across spatial and temporal thresholds. Movement holds both a philosophical and embodied presence within her work. Through moving image installation, projection, and long-exposure photography, she draws out the materiality of the image and inscribes layers of reflexive and collective memory in time and space. Whether captured through long-exposure photography, fluid ink, or projected video, her works inscribe motion as trace, employing techniques such as repetition and montage to physically alter and transform her subjects into temporal, often liminal, events of translation.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including the Varley Art Gallery, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto, JulieM Gallery, and The Petah Tikva Museum of Art. Nava is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Scholarship (2019), the Ontario Arts Council (2019), and the Canada Council for the Arts (2017). Recent projects include Inscribed Body, Assemblies of Gesture (2025), Assembly of Repair (2024), Shared View (2022), Variations on Broken Lines (2020), and Mobiux (2020–2023).
