Opening on May 9 at 6 PM, Remembering the Light marks a major solo exhibition by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige at Sursock Museum. Running until September 4, it explores submerged memory, poetic resistance and the matter of ruins.
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 archaeology, constructed imaginaries, fragility and persistence. In moments of extreme turmoil, the artists invoke poetry while also turning their gaze toward 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 underwater spectrum of light and the luminescence that emerges from its depths. Similarly, throughout the exhibition, Hadjithomas and Joreige summon poetic imagery to speak to the present. Their creative process has sparked 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 landmark projects from the past decade, such as Unconformities (recipient of the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Prize), explore the archaeological and geological layers of cities such as Beirut, Tripoli and Athens. With Museum Melancholy, the artists investigate the impact of catastrophe on 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, shifting from the “deep time” of geology to the ruins of cities, refugee camps and construction sites, always grounded in contemporary realities. In Remembering the Light, the artist duo questions what it means to see, remember, create images and narrate stories amid fractured landscapes, while never ceasing to gesture toward resistance and regeneration.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are internationally acclaimed for their singular approach to image-making, storytelling and research-based practice at the intersection of intimate memory, collective imaginaries, cinema and art. Working across film, installation, photography and sculpture, they have built a deeply engaged body of work that reveals the contours of hidden histories and probes the making of history and representation. Rooted in Lebanon yet resonating far beyond its borders, this exhibition marks their second major solo presentation in Beirut since 2012.
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