Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

The Lebanese filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige interweave thematic, conceptual and formal links through photographs, video installations, fictional films and documentaries. Self-taught, they became filmmakers and artists through necessity in the wake of the Lebanese civil wars and consider themselves as researchers. Their very personal oeuvre, based on their various encounters, has led them to explore the realm of the visible and of absence, leading to a 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 such as the missing people from the Lebanese civil war, a forgotten space project, geological and archaeological cores, or the strange consequences of Internet scams and spams. 

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s work is constructed around the production of types of knowledge, the rewriting of history and construction of imaginaries. They draw on their experience of their own country while going beyond its frontiers.

Their films have been shown and multi awarded in major international festivals and their artworks exhibited in museums and art centers around the world, most recently the Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum and Whitechapel Gallery in London; Haus der Kunst in Munich, IVAM in Spain, the Guggenheim in New York; SF Moma; MIT Boston, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Home Works Forum Beirut, as well as many biennales including Istanbul, Lyon, Sharjah, Kochi, Gwangju, Yinchuan, and Venice. They have also received many international awards as the Abraaj prize and the Marcel Duchamp award in 2017.