DUBAI: A cinematic retrospective of the work of Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is taking place at Cinema Akil in Dubai until March 23. Centered on the exclusive GCC release of “Memory Box,” which had its regional premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival in December, the program showcases a selection of the duo’s work from the past 22 years.
“Putting the films together like this gives you an idea of what we’ve been trying to do all these years,” says Hadjithomas, who was in Dubai with Joreige for the first week of the retrospective. “The films have a coherence. They give you something of the history of Lebanon, because all the films that we have made are linked to Lebanon and, maybe more specifically, to Beirut. There’s an artistic search in all of them.”
“Memory Box” had its regional premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival in December. (Supplied)
As well as multiple screenings of the critically-acclaimed “Memory Box,” the three-week program includes presentations of “The Lebanese Rocket Society,” “Ismyrna,” “Khiam,” “The Lost Film,” and “A Perfect Day.” Running in parallel with the retrospective is the exhibition “Messages with(out) a code,” which is being held at Dubai’s The Third Line until April 9. The first exhibition to be held at the gallery’s newly renovated space, it features a selection of new and seminal pieces from the duo’s ongoing “Unconformities” project.
“Our aim is to produce images that we can recognize, that are maybe closer to what we feel is us,” says Hadjithomas, whose teenage correspondence with her best friend Corrine was the inspiration for “Memory Box”. “We say sometimes that we work on stories kept secret, and stories kept secret are stories that are not the official history but stories that maybe we can relate to. It’s stories that we don’t hear a lot — stories that are absent. And maybe this absence is strange and so we ask ourselves why those stories are absent. Some voices that we feel are important, for example, we just don’t hear. Making visible the invisible, this is something that we really like, even in an artistic or formal way.”