Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige live in Paris and Beirut where they were born in 1969. They produce films, documentaries and installations. They belong to a generation of artists, filmmakers, writers and intellectuals who have contributed to the rebirth of artistic culture in Beirut after 15 years of civil wars in a country that is still subject to profound instability.

Hadjithomas and Joreige have to deal with the lack of documentation on the history of Beirut, as well as with the often truncated accounts of its history. In Circle of Confusion (1997), they invite viewers to remove and scatter 3,000 fragments of an aerial photograph of the city. Reduced to a fragile and transitory surface, the image echoes the destruction, both historical and symbolic, of Beirut. Offsetting the stigmatization and erasures of the events of the Lebanese civil war, the artists have created an image slated to slowly disappear, one that evokes memory gaps.

This work questions the representation of the city and critiques ready-made definitions of it. Each of the 3000 fragments affixed on the mirror is numbered and stamped “Beirut does not exist”. The installation allows the viewer to choose to reveal himself through his own reflection: It is impossible to grasp the city, one can only take a fragment of it.

The work Circle of Confusion by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is produced and presented by Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University in the framework of the exhibition I am there even if you don’t see me.

EXPLORE

• the fragmentation of the image, how it refers to the city and what it reveals about it.

QUESTION

• How does the viewer’s participation in this work, by removing and taking possession of a fragment of the city of Beirut , add to the meaning of Circle of Confusion?

Lasting Images is a 3-minute Super 8 film. It was shot in the 1980’s by Khalil’s uncle, who was kidnapped during the civil wars, just like 17,000 other Lebanese, and of whom nothing has been heard since. The film remained latent for more than 15 years. We found it in 2001 and sent it to the laboratory. When we had it developed, after all those years, it appeared fogged, all white. Through a lot of colour correction, images appeared progressively through the whiteness of the film as if they refused to disappear and came back to haunt us.

EXPLORE

• the importance of memory and remembering both in this work and in the wider history that it refers to, through the juxtaposition of radical circumstances with intangible, ethereal images.

QUESTION

• How do images and narrative combine and serve to activate memory in this work?

180 seconds of Lasting Images is a work derived from the video installation Lasting Images, based on the Super 8 film of 3 minutes (180 seconds). We printed every frame of the film. Each one is treated as a separate entity, cut out and placed on a spiral forming a mosaic of 4500 vignettes. Each photogram, reduced to a size of 4 x 6 cm, is stuck to a Velcro strip, and seems to quiver. At first sight, the work appears to be a white abstract painting with some purple hues. However, depending on where the viewer stands, it becomes possible to recognize in its opalescent surface landmarks, ghostly figures, part of the sea, a faraway boat…

EXPLORE

• the origins of the images that make up this work and the organizing principles that are applied to them.

QUESTION

• Does the way in which this work is organized reveal anything? If so, what is the process of revelation and what is revealed?

Withdrawing our images from the stream, that is how this project began. Having accumulated undeveloped rolls of film over the years, we decided to keep them in drawers, to date them and to list them in a notebook supposedly written by a fictitious character named Abdallah Farah. The latter has appeared in many of our works in relation to the project Wonder Beirut. These latent images form a kind of diary about family and sentimental life, photographic research and the highly eventful political and social history of contemporary Lebanon.

EXPLORE

• Notions of memory, narrative, and fiction and the ways in which these co-exist and interact with each other in this work.

QUESTION

• What is meant by the word “latent” and how is the concept of “latency” explored through inaccessible and unretrieved images on unprocessed film and the narratives that potentially take shape around them?

In Lebanon, we live surrounded by dead people looking at us. Since the beginning of the civil wars, posters have covered the walls of the city. They are images of men, martyrs who died tragically, while fighting or on mission, or who were political figures and were murdered. For years, we have been photographing the posters of martyrs belonging to different parties, religions or creeds, in various regions of the country, from south to north. But we only select posters greatly deteriorated by time. Hung up high, often in hardly attainable places, these posters remain there, the features and names have disappeared. There remains the rounded shape of a face, a barely perceptible silhouette, hardly recognizable.

We photographed these images at various stages of their progressive disappearance. Then, with the help of a graphic designer and various illustrators, we attempted to recover certain features, to accentuate others, to bring back through drawing, the image of a face, a trace, matter, a lasting image. The drawing is made on the basis of a study, attempting to retain a relation to reality, or on the basis of a sketch, referring more to a feeling or an impression. But can the image come back? Is it up to the promise it carries? In which way are these images to be read?

EXPLORE

• the ways in which Faces addresses questions of existence and reality, martyrdom, commemoration and forgetting.

QUESTION

• How are the images in this work manipulated, and to what end? What is it that becomes apparent or visible?

A series of photographs showing military vehicles abandoned when Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000. These “war trophies” were temporarily exhibited in the camp-museum of Khiam when they were destroyed once again during the July 2006 war. They cause a temporal shift: they are the indicators of another war, the witnesses and victims of a new one. Photographed from the same frontal set-up with particular attention to the depth of field, they produce a strange feeling of being out of touch with reality, they become symptomatic, and appear anachronistic and pathetic.

EXPLORE

• the notion of the “trophy” and how it applies to this work.

QUESTION

• What is the narrative that is established by the very particular maquette-like quality of these photographs and what does it question and tell us?

The video installation Khiam 2000-2007 is an experiment on narrative, on how, through words, the image builds up gradually on the principle of evocation. It is made up of two films, shot at an interval of 8 years but according to the same set-up.

For the first film, the set-up attempted to compensate the absence of images because, at the time, it was forbidden to visit the detention camp of Khiam in South Lebanon, which was in an area occupied by Israel and its proxy militia, the army of South-Lebanon. We had no image of the place, a kind of impossibility of representation. The former detainees explain how they managed to survive thanks to a certain form of artwork, by secretly making a needle, a pencil, a chess game…

In May 2000, after the withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon, the camp was made into a museum, then was totally destroyed by Israeli raids during the July 2006 war.

In 2007, we met the six former detainees again. The situation was somewhat similar, since the detention camp was no longer visible, reduced to ruins. Although treated as heroes in the past, the former detainees of Khiam appear now as somewhat defeated. The victors of the moment often ignore them, the history of the period is being rewritten without them. We asked their reactions to questions of memory, of History, and also mainly to the proposal put forward to rebuild the camp of Khiam as it was. But can one rebuild a detention camp? How can the traces be preserved?

EXPLORE

• the ways in which memory, history, and words each contribute to a process of representing and rebuilding Khiam.

QUESTION

• What kinds of questions are raised here, and how, regarding the possibility of rewriting historical events and reproducing artifacts?

DV CAM transferred to DVD
42 min.
Courtesy of the artists

A copy of our first feature film disappeared in Yemen, on the day of the tenth anniversary of the reunification of North and South. A year later we are there, following the trace of the lost film. An enquiry that takes us from Sana’a to Aden, a personal quest centred on the image and on our status as filmmakers in this part of the world …

EXPLORE

• the process of investigation that the image undergoes and the simultaneous construction of a narrative and making of a film.

QUESTION

• What conclusions do Hadjithomas + Joreige draw about the role played by the image and, more specifically, the filmic image and its context, in the Arab world?

Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige, Official Web site. http://www.hadjithomasjoreige.com/

Ardenne, Paul. Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige. Art Press 354 (2009): 90-1.

Azoury, Philippe. Il court, il court, le furet cinéma. Cahiers du cinéma 577 (March 2003): 70.

Davies, John. What Can Cinema Do?. C Magazine 101 (2008): 7-9.

Frodon, Jean-Michel. Tu n’as rien vu à Saïda. Cahiers du cinéma 634 (May 2008): 30.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. A State of Latency in Iconoclash: The Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Karlsruhe: ZKM; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 242-247.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Demain, on rentre à Beyrouth. Les Inrockuptibles 577-578-579 (2006/2007): 18-19.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Latency in Homeworks. Beyrouth: Ashkal Alwan, 2002. 40-48.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Liban, reconstitution historique. Mouvement 41 (October-December 2006): 14-17.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. OK, I’ll Show you my Work. Discourse 24.1 (Winter 2002): 85-98.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Que faisiez-vous entre cette aube et la dernière. Specimen 4 (1998): 68-77.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Tel un oasis dans le désert/Like an Oasis in the Desert in Appel à témoins. Quimper, France: Lequartier, Centre d’art contemporain de Quimper, 2004. 63-83.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. The Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer. Cabinet 16 (Winter 2003): 37-39.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Une solitude intenable. Les Inrockuptibles 556 (July 2006): 18-19.

Hadjithomas, Joana, and Khalil Joreige. Wonder Beirut. Mission Impossible 1 (Winter/Spring 2006): 14-29.

Hersant, I. Temps de guerre, terre de ruines et ciel de fête: Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige. Où sommes-nous? Espace Topographie de l’Art. ETC no. 81 March-April-May 2008 : 68-69.

Lequeret, Elisabeth. Et nous, où sommes-nous? Cahiers du cinéma 615 (September 2006): 44-5.

Lequeret, Elisabeth. Hadjithomas & Joreige, la possibilité d’une ville. Cahiers du cinéma 610 (March 2006): 35.

Mack, Joshua. Hadjithomas & Joreige. Art Review 13 (July/August 2007): 84-5.

Neyrat, Cyril. Open the Door, Please. Cahiers du cinéma 624 (June 2007): 48

Rehberg, Vivian. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Modern Painters 21.3 (April 2009): 71.

Thirion, Antoine. Les intermittences du jour : A Perfect Day de Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige. Cahiers du cinéma 610 (March 2006) : 34-35.

Wright, Stephen. Tel un espion dans l’époque qui naît: la situation de l’artiste à Beyrouth aujourd’hui / Like a Spy in a Nascent Era: On the Situation of the Artist in Beirut Today. Parachute 108 (October/November/December 2002): 12-31.