Filmmaker, artist — LB/FR

The Lebanese film-makers and artist Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (1969, Beirut) 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 with people, 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. The investigative process they adopt, together with their exploration of geographical and personal territory, endows their work with a particular aesthetic.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s work is constructed around the production of types of knowledge, the rewriting of history, construction of imaginaries, and also around contemporary modes of narration. They draw on their experience of their own country while going beyond its frontiers.
The films and artworks of Hadjithomas and Joreige have been collected by private and public institutions and museums around the world, including the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum and British Museum in London; the Guggenheim in New York and the Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, as well as many biennales including Istanbul, Lyon, Sharjah, Kochi, Gwangju, Yinchuan, Venice and the Triennale in Paris. In 2017 they were awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize, after exhibiting the project Unconformities at the Centre Pompidou.

http://hadjithomasjoreige.com