Joana Hadjithomas

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are Lebanese filmmakers and artists.

Their work includes feature and documentary films, video and photographic installations, sculpture, performance lectures and texts.

They are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents and their particular interest in the traces of the invisible and the absent, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of Internet scams or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities.

They occasionally use explicit life events as subjects for their work, such as the kidnapping and disappearance of Joreige's uncle, Alfred Junior Kettaneh, or Hadjithomas's paternal origins in the documentary ISMYRNA, with the poet and painter Etel Adnan.

Hadjithomas and Joreige interweave formal, conceptual and thematic links through photographs, video installations and films.

Their work in film often influences and leads to projects in the plastic arts, and vice versa.

They are known to work over several years on a single project, and often revisit earlier works in retrospection.

The importance of research in their work is such that they prefer to describe themselves not as artists but "chercheurs" – literally 'those that are looking for something' but also 'researchers'.

Inspired by personal archives and found documents, they work and research in collaboration with other writers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists and illustrators, and have spoken about the importance of this aspect: 'We believe in encounter more than in influence and, beyond that, we cultivate admiration: so many photos, film sequences, conversations, meetings and exchanges have nurtured and enabled us, at some time, to admire someone or something.'

Hadjithomas and Joreige are also university lecturers in Lebanon and Europe and the authors of numerous publications and performances.

Joana Hadjithomas is a former member of the Curriculum Committee of the Ashkal Alwan Academy, Home Work Space.

Both artists are co-founders of Abbout Productions, with Georges Schoucair and executive members of the board of Metropolis Art Cinema and the Cinemathèque in Beirut.

As well as artists, Hadjithomas and Joreige are film directors.

Joana Hadjithomas (born 10 August 1969, جوانا حاجي توما, ) and Khalil Joreige (خليل جريج) were born in Beirut in 1969 to refugee families, one of them Greek, Syrian and Lebanese, the other Palestinian and Lebanese.

They spent their childhood in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.

They both studied literature at the Paris Nanterre University and film in New York.

They are married.

They have collaborated since the early 1990s on videos, films, photographs, and installations.

Since 1999, the artists have collected over four thousand junk emails, digital scams intended to con their readers into sending financial aid.

Over the course of many exhibitions and installations, Hadjithomas and Joreige created an itinerary around these modern day scams, and traced their history back to the literary tradition known as The Jerusalem Letter.

Their filmography includes documentaries such as Khiam 2000 – 2007 (2008), The Lebanese Rocket Society : The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race (2013), which received multiple awards such as Best Documentary Award in Doha Tribeca Festival, Qatar, and ISMYRNA (2016) as well as feature films including Around the Pink House, (1999), A Perfect Day, (2005) , premiered at Locarno International Film Festival and awarded, among many other prizes, the Fipresci Press Prize, Je Veux Voir (I Want to See) (2008), starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué, which premiered in the official selection of Cannes Film Festival in 2008, and was awarded Best Singular Film by the French Critics Guild and their latest feature film Memory Box, released in 2021, which is based on Hadjithomas' notebooks and tapes made in Beirut as a teenager during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s.

and selected at the Berlinale and released in more than 40 countries.

In their fiction films, they are known to borrow tropes from documentary filmmaking, and vice versa, blurring the lines between the real and the illusory.

Several retrospectives of their films have been presented in renowned institutions such as Tate Modern (London), Cinematek (Brussels), Flaherty Seminar (New York), Institut Français and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), International Film Festival of Gijon (Spain), Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland) and MoMA (New York).

As part of this project SCAMS (2014), Hadjithomas and Joreige created the sound and video installation The Rumor of the World, where they asked 38 amateur actors to read and incarnate these scams.

A monograph under this title was published in 2015, edited by Omar Kholeif.

The project has been theorized as a kind of true crime in its narrative blending of documentation and re-enactment.

In 2016, they presented works such as I stared at Beauty So Much, a series of video and photographic works questioning: how can poetry be pitted against the chaos of today's world?

In 2016 and 2017, Hadjithomas and Joreige presented a large selection of their work from the late 1990s to the present day in 'Two Suns in a Sunset', a traveling museum exhibition that was shown at the Jeu de paume in Paris, Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, Haus der Kunst in Munich and IVAM in Valencia.

Their artworks are part of major private and public collections including British Museum (London), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Fond national d'art contemporain (France), MCA Chicago, Museum of Modern Art (Paris), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), and Victoria & Albert Museum (London) and they regularly present their works in solo and group exhibitions in museums and art centers around the world.

They participated in many biennials such as Taipei, Venice, Istanbul, Lyon, Sharjah, Kochi, Gwangju, and the Paris Triennale.

In 2017, Hadjithomas and Joreige won The Marcel Duchamp Prize for their presentation Unconformities, shown at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The installation constituted of core samples that had been collected over the past three years, underneath the cities omnipresent in the artists' history and thinking: Athens, Paris and Beirut.

Hadjithomas and Joreige have described this project as an interrogation about the possible era of the Anthropocene.

The series focuses on the place where fiction and real modes intersect and blur; and in 2017, they started developing the art project Unconformities which unveils the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities.

Under The Cold River Bed (2020) is their latest installation, as part of Unconformities, and tells the story of the "Nahr el Bared" refugee camp in the North of Beirut which was destroyed in 2007, leaving more than 30,000 people homeless.

During reconstruction works, major archaeological discoveries were made, going down to as early as the Neolithic period and up to the great Roman city of Orthosia.

Despite the important findings, the authorities were running out of time and refugee housing needed to be built.

A decision was taken, with a lot of controversy, to backfill the entire camp and seal it as a sarcophagus, protecting the archeological discoveries with a gigantic geo-textile and covering it with a concrete screed.

"The sculpture presented by the artists shows the thin membrane between the past and the future, an imprint of the sarcophagus of the camp, while documents tell its archeological, human and military history, its destruction, and its reconstruction.".