Sursock Museum presents Remembering the Light, a major solo exhibition by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Spanning works produced mainly between 2016 and the present, the exhibition brings together installations, photographs, films, video and sculptures. It explores the vertigo of archeology, constructed imaginaries, fragilities, and persistence. In moments of extreme turmoil, the artists invoke poetry while also turning their gaze to what lies beneath our feet surveying the emergence of subterranean, invisible worlds. These works evoke human and non-human perspectives on materiality, memory, cities, histories, and hidden narratives—uncovering what has been buried, forgotten, or concealed in a dizzying journey through the palimpsest of time.
Remembering the Light draws its title from a video work created in 2016, in which the artists experimented with the spectrum of light underwater and the luminescence that surfaces in its depths. Similarly, throughout the exhibition, Hadjithomas and Joreige summon poetic imagery to speak to the present. In the process of creation, they initiated a series of collaborations with geologists, archaeologists, poets, divers and scientists — inviting new forms and ways of thinking about materiality, repair, and regeneration.
The exhibition features several works from their ongoing series I Stared at Beauty So Much, inspired by poets such as Constantin Cavafy, Etel Adnan, and Georges Seferis, where poetry becomes a means of confronting chaos. Other projects from the past decade, such as Unconformities, recipient of the 2017 Duchamp Prize, delve into the layers of soil and the material traces of archaeological and geological time in cities, here Beirut, Tripoli and Athens. With Museum Melancholy, the artists investigate how catastrophe impacts art—how it transforms objects, landscapes, bodies, and our ways of seeing and showing, in times of rupture.
Hadjithomas and Joreige move along a temporal axis that is not linear, but rhizomatic, shape-shifting going backwards into the deep time of geology, and then moving forward to the ruins of cities, refugee camps and construction sites, always informed by the realities of the present. In Remembering the Light, the artist duo questions what it means here to see, remember and construct images and narratives in the most fractured landscapes, yet never ceasing to offer glimpses of resistance and renewal.
Press release from Sursock Museum
Image: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. ISMYRNA. 2016. Still image. Video HD, 50’. Image courtesy of the artists
