Valentin Noujaïm with Space Afrika

My practice explores how people survive collapse—spiritual, political, architectural. Coming from a Lebanese family marked by exile and war, I use moving images to capture lives shaped by beauty and violence. My work often begins with myth, memory, or urban legend, distorted into visual rituals through the grammars of thrillers, uncanniness, and melodrama. Moving between film and contemporary art, I blur fiction and reality through analogue formats and hybrid narratives. Shown at IFFR, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, MoMA, Fondation Cartier, and in my first solo show at Kunsthalle Basel, my works search for sanctuaries where destruction meets devotion.

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
Opera Omnia is a filmic descent through the afterlife of industry. Shot in Manchester and inspired by Dante’s Inferno, it follows ghostlike figures drifting through abandoned landscapes—monuments to the Industrial Revolution and its broken promises. Made in close collaboration with Space Afrika, the film entwines sound, architecture, and ritual into a haunting meditation on survival and disappearance. In dialogue with the Refugia manifesto, it treats refuge not as safety but as transformation. Amid ruins where machines once ruled, ghosts become guides and memory a shelter, reclaiming post-industrial space as a fragile beauty where new mythologies flicker from debris.

Valentin Noujaïm with Space Afrika

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
If awarded the CIRCA Prize, I would create the second part of a trilogy inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Following Opera Omnia (Hell), this new film reimagines Paradiso as a speculative zone where light, ruin, and survival coexist. Filmed in Athens, it wanders through ruins shaped by crisis and decay, and an aquatic paradise of submerged buildings and scars. At its heart is the angel: across religions, when a child dies they become one. With so many children lost this year in Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan, the film is a cinematic prayer—an homage to these new angels guiding us through wreckage.

FOLLOW VALENTIN NOUJAÏM ON INSTAGRAM

Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!