The Lebanese film-makers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (1969, Beirut) interweave thematic, conceptual and formal links through photographs, video installations, fictional films and documentaries. Self-taught, they became film-makers and artists through necessity in the wake of the Lebanese civil wars. Their very personal oeuvre, based on their various encounters with people, has led them to explore the realm of the visible and of absence, leading to a fascinating back-and-forth between life and fiction. For more than fifteen years, their films and artworks, created using personal and political documents, develop narratives out of stories kept secret in the face of the prevailing history. They are interested in the emergence of the individual in societies made up of communities, and the difficulty of living in the present.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s work is constructed around the production of types of knowledge, the rewriting of history, construction of imaginaries, and also around contemporary modes of narration. They draw on their experience of their own country while going beyond its frontiers. The investigative process they adopt, together with their exploration of geographical and personal territory, endows their work with a particular aesthetic.
The relationship between the image and the various media the artists use raises questions about representation in the face of the endless flow of often spectacular images that surrounds us and structures us. Their works have attempted to show what exists without being immediately visible. They have thus worked a great deal on representations of latency to create their art and their film work. “Latency is the state of things that exist invisibly, but which can become visible at any time,” explain the artists. Their art works and their films also develop different strategies: evocation, the increasing scarcity and even elimination of the image, the creation of new icons, an exploration of narration and document.
The relationship between the image and the various media the artists use raises questions about representation in the face of the endless flow of often spectacular images that surrounds us and structures us. Their works have attempted to show what exists without being immediately visible. They have thus worked a great deal on representations of latency to create their art and their film work. “Latency is the state of things that exist invisibly, but which can become visible at any time,” explain the artists. Their art works and their films also develop different strategies: evocation, the increasing scarcity and even elimination of the image, the creation of new icons, an exploration of narration and document.
What stories can be transmitted when the thread of history is broken, when no visible trace of it remains? What representations should be produced in the face of the prevailing and restrictive imaginary worlds? Can the latter be challenged with images and poetry? “Two Suns in the Sunset” looks at major projects of their artistic and film output from the late 1990s to the present day, and presents two new works, including ISMYRNA, a film co-produced with the Jeu de Paume and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah. The Jeu de Paume’s exhibition explores their particular relationship with the image and with narrative, while revealing the different approaches and strategies they have used, as well as the different narratives and investigations that they have immersed themselves in.
Curated by: Hoor Al Qasimi (Sharjah Art Foundation), José Miguel G. Cortés (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern), Marta Gili (Jeu de Paume) and Anna Schneider (Haus der Kunst, Munich).
Always with You, 2011
The video shows a poster campaign during the parliamentary elections of the year 2000, and its invasion of the urban scenery of Beirut. Slogans such as “Always with you”, “For your eyes” and “I’m not lonely, you’re with me” have sentimental connotations that are unusual in an electoral campaign. The accumulation and saturation of images leads to a form of disappearance. Little by little, posters are superimposed on top of posters, blending and merging with each other…
Waiting for the Barbarians, 2013
Starting with the poem of Constantine Cavafy “Waiting for the Barbarians”, the artists explore panoramic images of Beirut shifting from mobile to immobile, from the general to the constantly excavated detail. The works dwell on the time-lag of photographic processes. The video is made by filming four photographs made up of more than 50 images taken at different times. They are full of spatial – and mainly temporal – inconsistencies. Different instants mingle, thus creating impossible images evoking otherworldly visions. The camera passes over the photos and stops at certain points that become surprisingly animated through subtle video overlays. The resultant effect is an animated photograph that creates a tension between stillness and motion, displacing the viewer’s gaze and the expected representation – giving the illusion of suspended time but also movement that cannot be stopped which appears ever present. As if time, space and movement were constantly fighting. Temporalities become superimposed, nature is reversed and many suns appear on multiple horizons.
Remembering the light, 2016
A strange thing seems to happen to colours in the sea. Once in the water, perceptions change. The deeper one goes, the narrower the light spectrum becomes. Colours vanish one after the other: red disappears first, then orange, yellow, green, blue, and finally it’s darkness, all is black. But if the dark sea bed is illuminated, plankton remembers the light and reveals its luminescence. The artists experiment with underwater exploration, this sensorial trip. Five actors and divers, dressed in different colours, are asked to allow themselves to sink deeper and deeper into the sea. A vibrant scarf is thrown into the sea to see what would happen to its colours. From one screen to another, images dialogue, haunted by imaginary worlds, a sunken city, buried memories of war, military vehicles thrown into the water… other temporalities inhabit the abyss.
Coproduction: Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
ISMYRNA, 2016
Joana and the artist and poet, Etel Adnan, met 15 years ago. They quickly became close, sharing a city that they had never been to: Izmir, formerly called Smyrna, in Turkey. Joana’s paternal Greek family were forced into exile from Smyrna by the Turkish armies after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Etel’s Greek mother was also born in Smyrna and was married to a Syrian officer of the Ottoman Army and exiled in Lebanon after the fall of the empire. Etel and Joana lived in an imaginary Smyrna, Izmir, without ever setting foot there. Nowadays, they are confronted with the transmission of History and question their attachment to objects, places, imaginary constructions and mythologies without images. What is to be done with the sorrow of our parents? Even if it constituted us, could we live today, as Etel would say, in the eternal present? Their personal experiences, their storytellings serve as a background to the region’s changes after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, questionning borders, identity and belonging.
Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah.
The Rumor of the World, 2014
People of various ages and origins, nonprofessional actors, filmed in close-up, stare at us, speak to us, incarnating one scam e-mail, a story. These faces and voices are spread out across twenty-three screens and one hundred loudspeakers, weaving a network, a visual and virtual meshwork of rumours.
This rumour starts to fade only when the spectator approaches the screen, so as to create a shot-countershot. Only at this distance does the story, incarnated by a singular individual, reveal itself. If the spectator steps back, a multitude of voices interfere with the sound and echo within the space. By the presence of these thirty-eight nonprofessional actors, the scams, sent out usually in a blind and collective manner, become individually directed, between a subject and another. Can these emails of swindle, drafted in a specific style, marked with the grammatical and syntactic maladroitness of automatic translation applications, oscillating between the comical and poetic, be transformed into literary material? Can we regard them as micro-narratives, instances of fiction – maybe even charged with emotion –, or anecdotal accounts in the etymological sense of stories kept secret? As with theatre, a kind of endorsement emerges between the set up and the audience where the spectator subscribes to the actors’ performance rather than reality. For the span of an instant, the monologues seem credible, until the character mentions money, thus dissolving faith and blurring the limit between truth and lie, fiction and documentary. As the installation pieces them together, from one country and event to the other, from one story, face and voice to the next, these strange tales make up the rumour of the world.
All texts © Jeu de Paume.
