Paola Yacoub (b. 1966) graduated from the Architectural Association in London. Since 1994, she has conducted artistic experiments on our relations to automata in photography and architecture. In 1995, she worked as IFAPO’s architect for the archeological excavations of Beirut city center. She began collaborating with Michel Lasserre on an artistic practice in 2000. They made notations on the aspect variations of territories in conflict and post-conflict situations, before working on the perception of territories immersed in information flows. They have undertaken artistic interventions into the characteristics of actions, developing their practice within the broader framework of extended actionism.

Their public lectures and essays were brought together in the monograph Beirut is a Magnificent City. Synoptic Pictures (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2003). Yacoub and Lasserre have been awarded several grants and residencies, including the DAAD in Berlin in 2005. They have exhibited together in, amongst others, the Venice Biennale, 2000 and 2003; Kunst-Werke in Berlin, 2000; the Witte de With in Rotterdam, 2003; and the Centre pour l’image contemporaine/Mamco in Geneva, 2006. Paola Yacoub’s solo exhibitions include: a retrospective, Drawing with the Things Themselves, at Beirut art center in 2011; and the exhibition Kiss the black Stones at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2012. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including The Pencil of Culture at Centre Pompidou, 2016; the Taipei Biennale in Taiwan, 2016; Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbors at Maxxi in Rome, 2017-2018; En Suspens at Le Bal in Paris, 2018; and Sabine Weiss, les villes, la rue, l’autre at Centre Pompidou, 2018.

Paola Yacoub is the founding director of the program ARP (Artistic Research Practices, since 2013) at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), in collaboration with the Sursock Museum in Beirut.