Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige 'find some light' on return to Beirut after 14 years

The National

11 hours ago

By August 2022, Beirut had become used to the dark. The city was marking two years since the port explosion, and was deep in the throes of political and economic collapse. A new kind of normal had taken hold – power cuts, vanishing fuel and institutional paralysis.
As a message of hope, the National Museum chose to remain open, even without electricity. People came, lighting the galleries with their mobile phones, bringing its ancient mosaics and sarcophagi out of the darkness. It was a moment of shared persistence.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige were among the museum's visitors. The experience stayed with them – how in the absence of light, people strove to see anyway. They documented the moment in Sarcophagus of Drunken Loves (2024).
The work is among those displayed in Remembering the Light, their exhibition at the Sursock Museum. But it also serves as the poetic anchor of the exhibition.
Remembering the Light is the Lebanese duo's first major exhibition in Beirut for 14 years. Their homecoming is significant, particularly as a lot of their works revolve around social and political tensions in Lebanon.
'The world and Lebanon has gone through so many ruptures lately,' Hadjithomas says. 'It was really important to consider how we can do an exhibition, how we can continue in places that have been so fractured. You have to find some light, because if not, we are totally in despair.'
The exhibition opens with Palimpsests (2017), a video installation that delves, quite literally, beneath the surface of Beirut. Created from footage of core samples extracted from construction sites, the work unearths fragments of the city's cursed histories – from modern rubble to ancient geological layers.
For Hadjithomas and Joreige, these cores are not just soil, but 'raw film reels' waiting to be read. With its drone shots and microscopic imagery, Palimpsests swiftly establishes the exhibition's central gesture: a vertical and temporal excavation of memory, rupture and regeneration.
In Message Without a Code (2022), the artists build upon a previous work with archeologists, in which they photographed archeological debris. Clay fragments, seeds and stones were carefully arranged on gauze cloth. These original images were lost in the 2020 port explosion.
'They were hanged in our studio and were destroyed,' Hadjithomas says. Rather than reprint them, Hadjithomas and Joreige chose to remake them as tapestries. The artists collaborated with the TextielLab at Tilburg's TextielMuseum to develop the tapestries. The works incorporate several weaving processes to impart their textured and layered feel.
'It's like an illusion, giving the impression that you have a three-dimensional work,' Hadjithomas says. As such, the weaving process became a way to preserve what was lost while giving new material form to fragile, buried histories.
The adjacent work, meanwhile, takes on a different approach with archeological remnants.
Blow Up (2025) turns microscopic historical remnants into monuments. Drawing on finds unearthed near the museum, the artists enlarge fragments such as marine sediments and Roman glass shards, encasing them in resin and steel. These sculptures function as both scientific samples and speculative relics, existing as tangible evidence and imagined history.
'The core sampling that we recuperated were from the neighbourhood of the museum,' Hadjithomas says, adding that their presentation at Sursock Museum gives an added significance to the work. 'The audience will be able to see what is specifically under their feet. You see the stratigraphy of this place and how it evolved and changed.'
Message Without a Code and Blow Up both deal with archeological remnants. But where the former grapples with loss and fragility, Blow Up reflects upon discovery and amplification. Side by side, the two offer different ways of confronting the invisible weight of history.
Their pairing is a testament to the efficacy of the exhibition's curation. It doesn't just revisit works but draws unexpected connections between then, revealing new tensions and resonances within the artists' evolving practice.
'Works change in time,' Joreige says. 'Sometimes, when you are presenting two works next to each other, they are creating new meanings, new connections.'
Questions of visibility and erasure taken on a more urgent turn in Under the Cold River Bed (2020). The sculptural and slideshow-based work is set in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al Bared.
After the camp was destroyed during a 2007 battle between the Lebanese army and Islamist groups, reconstruction efforts uncovered the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Orthosia. In Under the Cold River Bed, the artists worked closely with archeologists to trace the entangled timelines of Nahr Al Bared and the lost Roman city.
They highlight a dilemma specific to the site: how to preserve an important archaeological discovery while also meeting the needs of a displaced community. Using sculptural forms made of soil, resin and red sand, along with a projected slide show of images and testimonies, the work brings together stories of forced migration, buried histories and the overlapping violence of loss and recovery. The project was developed in collaboration with artist Maissa Maatouk and archeologist Hadi Choueri. It also featured in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial.
Projects like Under the Cold River Bed make it clear that these works were not created in isolation. Collaboration runs through much of Hadjithomas and Joreige's work, not just as an artistic method but as a guiding principle.
In works like Time Capsules (2017), Trilogies (2018-2021), and Zigzag Over Time (2022), scientific core samples – extracted from sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens – are actively reinterpreted in collaboration with archeologists and geologists. Sarcophagi (2019) continues this engagement, imagining future forms of preservation, speculating what materials might one day require safeguarding for posterity.
Meanwhile, Remember the Light (2016) – which lends its title to the exhibition – extends this inquiry to the nature of perception itself. Filmed underwater, the work captures the slow disappearance of colour as divers descend into the darkness, until they are once again captured by light. The project shows how memory isn't static, but flickers, reappears and refracts based on external stimuli. The project was co-produced by the Sharjah Art Foundation and developed with the help of five actor-divers.
The artists' spirit of collaboration extends beyond the scientific and material.
In ISMYRNA (2016), Hadjithomas and Joreige sit in conversation with the late poet and artist Etel Adnan to explore how displacement shapes personal and collective histories. The focus of the conversation is Smyrna, now Izmir. Hadjithomas and Adnan shared ancestral ties to the city. While neither of them ever visited the city, they inherited it through family trauma and diaspora. The film is a powerful example of how storytelling can reclaim what geography and time have fractured.
In Khiam (2000-2007), the artists document the testimonies of six former detainees of the Khiam prison camp in southern Lebanon. Between 1985 and 2000, the camp was operated by the South Lebanon Army, a militia backed and funded by Israel.
Filmed before and after the site's destruction, the work reflects on survival, resistance and the role of creativity within captivity.
Together, these works shift the focus from geological time to lived experience, expanding the exhibition's exploration of what it means to remember, reconstruct and resist disappearance.
Finally, the exhibition concludes with the deeply poetic Index of Sighs (2024). A multi sensory installation of photographs, self-portraits and an accompanying sound piece that records visitors sighs. The intimate exhalations range from relief to weariness and serve as a wordless testimony to living with rupture, elegantly bringing the exhibition to a full circle.
'You have a QR code with each work, through which you can hear the sigh,' Joreige says. 'For us, the sigh is meaningful because sometimes words are useless or they don't express enough. But at least we can sigh together. And it can be painful or it can be joyful.'