Haus der Kunst

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Two Suns in a Sunset

28 Oct 2016 - 12 Feb 2017

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
La Rumeur du monde, 2014
14 to 26 screens, 40 to 100 speakers, 38 HD videos with color and sound, durations variable. Coproduction Villa Arson, Nice, HOME, Manchester and MIT List Visual Arts Center for Cambridge and Futurum. © Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige. Galerie In Situ — fabienne leclerc
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Toujours avec toi, 2011
color video, 6 minutes. © Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige. Galerie In Situ — fabienne leclerc
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Se souvenir de la lumière, 2016
2 HD videos, color, sound, 8 minutes. Coproduction Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah. © Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige. Galerie In Situ — fabienne leclerc
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
Equivalences, part of Archeology of our Gaze, 1997, Courtesy the artists
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
ISMYRNE, 2016
video still. Coproduction Jeu de Paume, Paris and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah. © Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige. Galerie In Situ — fabienne leclerc.
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Faces (détail), 2009 © Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige. Galerie In Situ — fabienne leclerc
JOANA HADJITHOMAS & KHALIL JOREIGE
Two Suns in a Sunset
28 October 2016 - 12 February 2017

The films and photographs by artist and filmmaker duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (both born in 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 are 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.
 

Tags: Etel Adnan