The films and photographs by artist and filmmaker duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (both b. 1969 in Beirut) focus on the history of their native country of Lebanon. Politicized at an early age by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), they redefine the role of images in relation to memory and history and explore the parameters of images and their narratives. Drawing inspiration from found documents, personal archives and poetic experience, Hadjithomas and Joreige navigate a unique route between art and cinema. Their documentary and feature films, photographs, installations, texts and performances develop narratives and images articulated around forgotten events or stories kept secret that resist to official history and dominant imaginaries. Part of their visual strategy is to displace the gaze in order to visualize the complex situation of their region and beyond. Tropes like the concept of latency, the visible and the absent, the continuous interchange between reality and fiction inspire their multifaceted experimentations that question systems of representation, the fabrication of imaginaries and the writing of history.
The exhibition "Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: Two Suns in a Sunset" establishes thematic, conceptual and formal bridges between their works, allowing visitors to travel among the artists' various investigations and experiments from the late 1990s to the present day. It follows many thematic threads: images affected by war and violence; missing and lasting images; a forgotten Lebanese space program from the 1960s; the recent body of work focusing on the virtuality of internet spams and scams and addressing beliefs, the imagery of corruption and a strange historiography of the world; lastly, they have been exploring poetic routes and there by immersing themselves into questions of transmission of history shifting bodies, borders, and notions of belonging with two new films, ISMYRNA, in conversation with Etel Adnan, and Remembering the Light.
The exhibition includes an extensive film program, five films will be presented every Saturday from 12 to 6 pm in Haus der Kunst's auditorium.
A collaboration between Jeu de Paume, Paris; Sharjah Art Foundation, Al Mareija – Sharjah; IVAM, Valencia; and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
