Hadjithomas/Joreige

Marcel Duchamp Prize 2017

Since the mid-1990s, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (b. 1969, live and work in Beirut and Paris) have worked together in the visual arts and cinema–shooting documentaries and fictions such as “I Want To See,” starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué and screened at the Cannes Festival in 2008.

Their practice in both fields is imbued with a distinctive aesthetic that occupies spheres of the visible and the fictional, nourishing a fascinating back and forth between life and fiction. Investigative processes, excavation, and the representations of historic, social, cultural, and political factors are at the heart of their practice. In their words: “All our work exists on the frontier of a reality where the question of the territory and its delimitation (that of art, that of personal life), the question of the social body and the individual body, are constantly being posed.”

Following the duo’s bodies of work since the early psycho-geographic mapping of Beirut to the recent projects gathered together under the title “Lebanese Rocket Society,” this book is the first reference monograph dedicated to the artists. Essays by Guggenheim Foundation Curator Suzanne Cotter and cinema critic and historian Jean-Michel Frodon, as well as a conversation held by Michèle Thériault, Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, with fellow artists and thinkers (Jalal Toufik, Etel Adnan, Dominique Abensour, etc.), explore the numerous themes of their practice.

Published with the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal.