The Art Pledge
Portrait of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Photo: Tarek Moukaddem

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Born in
1969
From
Beirut, Lebanon
Lives and works
Paris, France
Represented by
In Situ - fabienne leclerc
Website
http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joana_Hadjithomas_and_Khalil_Joreige

UN goals

Tags

Our impulse to make films or works of art comes from our obsession with traces and the questions they raise. What do we do with these traces? And if we keep no trace of the past, is it possible to live our present?

Biography

Lebanese filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have worked together since the 1990s, building upon their home country’s history at the dawn of the civil war started in 1976. Using political and personal archives as building blocks, the couple’s work interrogates the disappearance or manipulation of images, and what it means to be an active participant in the construction of memory. Spanning different media, from performance and installation to documentaries and films, the artists consider what is left and what has vanished once the dust settles. 


In the same vein of interrogating the veracity of photographic relics, Joan Fontcuberta and his realistic photomontages make its viewers question their own eyes. Similarly inspired by the political instability of his country, namely the Franco regime in Spain, Fontcuberta chooses to contrast this heaviness through the lightness of humor and mixing fact and fiction. 


Hadjithomas and Joreige’s strong ties with archaeology can further be linked to the birth of modern archaeology with the reign of Napoleon III in France, who followed in the steps of his uncle Napoleon the 1st and his Egyptian campaign, which culminated with the translation of the Rosetta stone by Jean-François Champollion. The Emperor, a great admirer of Caesar, sent archaeological missions in Spain, Syria, or Tunisia for example. This search for palpable truth, to confront what historians elect as so, is what the artist couple challenges in all its complexities.

Career highlights

Solo shows

Group shows

Collections

Media

Selected artworks

Related artists