Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Photographic print

H.79 x W.62,5 cm

H.89,5 x W.76 cm (with frame)

Bio

1969 Born in Beirut, Lebanon, where they live and work.

1997 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige start the plastic project Wonder Beirut, the project consists of three components, which they will pursue over several years.

2005 A Perfect Day, the feature-length fiction film is awarded the Fipresci Prize (International Federation of Film Press) at the Locarno International Film Festival.

2008 They present at the Cannes Film Festival, in the section Un certain regard, Je veux voir (I want to see), a feature-length fiction film with Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué. Winner of the award for Best Singular Film of the Year.

2012 Their project The Lebanese Rocket Society, the project, dedicated to the Lebanese space adventure of the 60s, gives rise to a documentary and numerous installations.

2014 They elaborate a whole set of plastic and filmic researches around internet scams.

In 2016, they will present a monographic exhibition at the Musée du Jeu de Paume. Today, their work as filmmakers and visual artists is presented throughout the world, for example at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the Venice Biennale...

Libération 2016

Samedi 29 janvier 2011 (Saturday, January 29, 2011)

By Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (1969, Lebanon)

"The Egyptian uprising of 2011 is everyone's business. It embodies an energy and a will to change that gives hope. By reactivating this historical fact in the present, we want to show how, in a certain place and at a certain time, civil society can disobey to defend ideals. The Arab revolutions generated emotionally powerful images, whose impact transcends national borders. The one retained by Libération accentuates the historical aspect of the event. We have reworked it with a process developed in our project Wonder Beirut, conducted from 1997 to 2006. We then intervened on a series of old postcards from Beirut that we partially burned and attributed to a fictitious arsonist photographer, Abdallah Farah. Our aim was to question the representation of the writing of history and war, by inscribing the Lebanese conflict at the heart of the ideal vision produced by tourist imagery. Here, we also wished to reactivate in the present the front page of LibérationThis is the first time that we have been able to bring the poetic dimension inherent to this revolution, but also to echo what we are experiencing today. We took a slide from the front cover and then burned part of the image. This gesture questions the way in which violence transforms and affects representation and the image itself. The silhouettes stand out, the context fades away questioning the embodiment of other commitments, other struggles, elsewhere on the globe. Today, territories are intermingled, making fragmented and binary reasoning obsolete: we realize that what happens elsewhere has direct repercussions here... We chose this one because it questions everyone about current dysfunctions. As artists, we work on a very different temporality from that of the media. We do not postpone, we do not inform. Our work attempts a displacement of the glance, to allow other forms of apprehensions of our present. Because it is urgent to rethink the complexity of the world, to disobey, to rise up."

EN