Khaled Alwarea (b. 1988, Damascus) is a Syrian architect and multidisciplinary artist based in Marseille, France. His practice fluidly blends architecture, photography, video, scenography, and public art into a unified artistic language — treating disciplines as tools to express the complexities of human experience.

Rooted in his personal journey from Syria to France, Khaled’s work explores themes of identity, displacement, and collective memory. He often moves between intimate narratives and large-scale public installations, seeking to connect the personal with the political, the ephemeral with the monumental.

He is the co-founder and creative director of UV LAB, a transdisciplinary collective that transforms public spaces into immersive, collaborative environments. His installations have been presented across Europe and the Middle East, including the monumental LE KRAKEN at Les SUBS in Lyon, awarded the Mondes Nouveaux grant from the French Ministry of Culture.

His experimental film Panic Attack received the Merit Award at the Awareness Film Festival in Los Angeles, and his photographic series Seeking Refuge earned an Honorable Mention from the Monovisions Awards in London.

He received the Marie-Thérèse Alli production award for Without Interpretation: About Autohomophobia and Other Insecurities, an immersive audiovisual installation exploring internalized oppression within queer experience.

Khaled is also the creator of Syria’s Queer Memory, an ongoing archival project documenting the hidden histories of Syria’s LGBTQ+ communities. This work was awarded the Prix Recanati-Kaplan 2025 and supported by Ettijahat – Independent Culture.

Through his diverse practice, Khaled creates poetic interventions across mediums and geographies — tracing the invisible threads between memory, absence, and transformation.

Art Residences:

• August 2023
  Chez bushwick - villa Albertine New York, USA

• March 2022
  Warehouse421 - Homebound Residency, Dubai, UAE

• January 2022

  LA BRIQUETERIE, CDCN du Val-de- Marne, France

• October 2021
  Château de Goutelas, Marcoux, Loire, France

Awards and Honors:

• 2025 Prix Recanati-Kaplan La Fondation Recanati-Kaplan et la Villa Albertine, en partenariat avec l’Institut du monde arabe.

• 2023 Guest speaker, Impact Symposium Pact Zollverein, Essen, Germany

• 2023 production grant, Sanad in the Digital Realm, Ettijahat – Independent Culture

• 2021 Production Fund Award, Mondes Nouveaux, by the French ministry of culture, LE KRAKEN at Le SUBS Lyon, France

• 2017 Guest speaker, Equal Before the Image Seminar, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, Sweden

Selected Exhibitions:

• 2023 Land, Safety, and Grief
  Free Watermelons - AI-reconstructed Photography
  Oyoun, Berlin, Germany

• 2023 Euphrates, Heritage, Eternity,
  Photography Exhibition.
  Van Loon Museum
 , Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• 2023 Al Ayoun
  Video Art
  Al Beyt Collective, Basel, Switzreland

• 2022 Maintain - Heaven For Artists.
  Installation art.
  Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon

• 2021 Déflagration.
  The Syrian LGBTQ+ Memory “artifact”

  La galerie de l’aa-e, Paris, France

• 2020 Arts From the Future, Information/Misinformation 040820, Participatory Digital Performance.
  Virtual
- USA

• 2020 States of Existence.
  Video Art.
  Virtual - SEAS, Brighton, UK

• 2019 Festival Vision d’exil
  Multimedia Performance/Installation

  Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France

• 2019 Brown University

  Photography Exhibition 

  Providence, USA

• 2018 Festival Vision d’exil

  Installation art “BRUTALISTa”

  Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France

• 2018 Engagement Program

  Audio/Visual Performance “PANIC BY PROXY”

  Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA

• 2017 Syrian Eyes of the World

  Photography
Exhibition
  UNIVERSITÉ BORDEAUX MONTAIGNE,
Bordeaux, France