Hadjithomas + Joreige : Working Through Emotion, Memory, and History

The evocative title of the exhibition I’m There Even If You Don’t See Me1 1  - The exhibition was curated by Michèle Thériault, director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, where it was presented from September 1 to October 10, 2009. suggests a multitude of psychological states almost gothic in range: ­sadness, nostalgia, persistence, but also anger, bitterness, even ­resentment. Featuring photographic, video, and installation works by the Lebanese documentary filmmaker and artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, I’m There Even If You Don’t See Me stems from their ­experiences of Lebanon’s complex history of wars, and the ongoing ramifications on its citizens, landscape, and collective consciousness. And yet, despite this undercurrent of affect running through Hadjithomas’ and Joreige’s art practice, their works do not aim for an emotional catharsis, whether for themselves or viewers. Refusing simplistic renderings of their ­sensitive subject matter, Hadjithomas and Joreige navigate larger surrounding issues to create works that are contemplative rather than sentimental; philosophical instead of prescriptive; engagé but not polemical. 

Lasting Images (2003) crystallizes effectively Hadjithomas’ and Joreige’s modus operandi. Itconsists of a projection of film footage (­transferred to video) taken directly from a found home movie that, due to poor storage conditions, resulted in the overexposure of the film stock. The original content has been consequently almost entirely abstracted into dancing spots and scratches on a bleached out background. In the middle of this short sequence, a few faint figures briefly emerge. A jolly party of friends or family: footage shot from a moving boat, bohemian figures in jeans and berets, laughing and gesturing towards the camera. A short text at the end explains that the film belonged to a relative — one Alfred Junior Kettach — who was kidnapped during the Lebanese civil war and missing ever since. Is he one of the youthful group pictured, or is he behind the camera, his presence felt only in its positioning? The lack of sound combined with the erasure of most of the film, leaves only the fleeting apparition of ghostly figures — Barthes’s punctum — highlighting the loss of the family member in question, and others like him. Beyond the clearly elegiac thrust to this work (what could be read as a kind of futile attempt to evoke the dead), Lasting Images underscores how entire lives have been literally razed from a country’s official history, and to the importance of bearing moral witness so that Alfred and others who have suffered the same fate are not forgotten.