Lecture-performance | Vertigo by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Saturday, October 26th, 2019 | 6:00pm at Sursock Museum

What lies beneath our feet? What are the traces of history?

For many years, artists Joana Hadjithomas and  Khalil Joreige have collected core samples that reveal the invisible remains of buried cities lying underneath contemporary ones. Recovered from construction sites that discard them after use, these cores show temporal ruptures, traces of conflicts and wars, natural disasters, and regenerations. History and its shifts appear not as layers but as actions, a palimpsest mixing epochs and civilizations, baring unconformities and missing interval in the geologic record of time.

Stones become markers of infinite time, taking hold of our imagination and propelling us in a vertiginous scale: the macro and the micro, the overall plan and the close up, continuity and discontinuity. This lecture-performance explore possible narratives and representations of our erratic history, questioning what is designated as the Anthropocene, and sketching the outlines of an unknown form of futurity. 

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are artists and filmmakers who question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of contemporary history. They explore the traces of the invisible and the absent in stories kept secret, such as the missing people from the Lebanese civil wars, a forgotten space project, geological and archaeological cores, or the strange consequences of Internet scams and spams. Their films have been shown and awarded in major international festivals, and their works exhibited in numerous museums and art centres including the Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum and Whitechapel Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston; and Home Works Forum, Beirut; as well as many biennials in Istanbul, Lyon, Sharjah, Kochi, Gwangju, Yinchuan, and Venice. In 2017, they were awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize for their project Unconformities

This event is part of Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices.

Photo courtesy of the artists.