Wavelength: Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

This program will be moderated by Holiday Powers, Assistant Professor in Art History at VCUarts Qatar.

Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, being documentary or fiction film.
 
Together, they have directed numerous films that have been shown and awarded in the most important international film festivals before having theatrical releases in many countries. Their films include ISMYRNA (2016); The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of The Lebanese Space Race (2012), which received multiple awards such as Best Documentary Award in Doha Tribeca Festival, Qatar; Khiam 2000-2007 (2008); 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; A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar) (2005), premiered at Locarno International Film Festival and awarded, among many other prizes, the Fipresci Press Prize; The Lost Film (Al Film el Mafkoud) (2003); and Al Bayt el Zaher (Around the Pink House) (1999). Several retrospectives of their films have been presented in renowned institutions such as Cinematek (Brussels), Flaherty Seminar (New York), Institut Français and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), International Film Festival of Gijon (Spain), Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Lincoln Center (New York), Locarno International Film Festival (Switzerland), MoMA (New York), Paris Cinema, Tate Modern (London), Visions du réel (Nyon). Their latest feature film, Memory Box will be released in 2021.
 
The artists are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents, with particular interests in the traces of the invisible and the absent, histories kept secret such as the disappearances during the Lebanese Civil War, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of Internet scams and spams or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities. Among their major artworks, Circle of Confusion (1997), Lasting Images (2003), The Lebanese Rocket Society (2011), SCAMS (2014), I stared at Beauty So Much (2016) and Unconformities (2017), showcased at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize.