The Lebanese video artists, documentarians and photographers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have been a duo since the 1990s, making works that address the turbulent history of their homeland. This monograph surveys the duo's projects, including their most recent series of installations and research on the now defunct Lebanese space exploration program.
Beirut had been a renowned resort and a center of culture and style for hundreds of years, when, in the late twentieth century, it became the site of terrible violence and trauma. More than 15 years after the official end of Lebanon's civil war in 1990, political instability, bombings and assassinations still dominate the international headlines, obscuring years of swift change. In that time, Beirut became fertile ground for radical and innovative art-making and critical thought. "Out of Beirut" introduces new and recent work by artists who have been at the forefront of that activity, and who, in this new time of turmoil and change, will be watching Beirut's fate closely, chronicling it, and perhaps by their responses, changing it. With work by Fadi Abdallah, Gilbert Hage, Heartland, Bernard Khoury, Rabib Mroue, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, Jalal Toufic, Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre and Akram Zaatari, among others.
We are transitioning towards a new and different culture, a digital one in which the medium of photography becomes dangerously diluted in an image world produced moment by moment and consumed at a rapid pace. Photographic images and their reception inevitably converge with the symbolic, cultural, social, and political implications of the act of looking. Here, 40 contributors share their perspectives on photography in Lebanon, evoking its numerous forms of existence. Examining techniques, practices, uses, objects, images, histories, and artistic approaches, the book presents a fascinating collection of 380 photographs produced between the end of the 19th century and today.
This book traces the work and research of filmmakers and visual artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and their exploration through their work of online spam e-mails, specifically, advance-fee frauds and scam messages. The artists present material they have collected since 1999, focusing on the way that personal narratives are formed and articulated in a post-digital age. This work functions as a starting point for a broader discussion by leading scholars and thinkers on the nature of power and trust in the age of the Internet. Underlying this is an interrogation of faith: How has trust been recomposed by the Internet, and equally, how does the traditional practice of faith question the way that individuals relate to each other online? Copublished with Villa Arson, Nice; HOME, Manchester; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA Contributors Nicholas Auray, Finn Brunton, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Henriette Huldisch, Omar Kholeif, Norman M. Klein, Eric Mangion, Laura U. Marks, Franck Leibovici, Sarah Perks, Jacques Rancière, Uzma Rizvi, Rasha Salti
The ecological crisis the world is currently experiencing calls for an urgent rethinking of our relationship to nature, natural resources, and the entirety of life on Earth, as well as that of humans to each other. The time has come for repurposing coexistence, aided by post-human thought and technological advancement, and for realizing that humans are merely part of, rather than the center of, our world. Potential Worlds: Planetary Memories and Eco-Fictions, published in conjunction with group shows at Zurich's Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Baku's YARAT Contemporary Art Space, questions forms of knowledge developed in the course of annexation of the environment and asks what ideas of nature might emerge from the current crisis and how we might perceive nature in the future. Thirty-six artists from around the world featured in this book examine the ecological and social consequences of the past and ongoing conquests of land for purposes of accumulating power and resources. Essays by Benjamin H. Bratton, T. J. Demos, Reza Negarestani, and Jussi Parikka shed light on multiple different perspectives, such as colonialism, post-humanism, ecology, and artistic adaption of new technologies, and investigate the potential future of mankind living in alliance with nature and the role of art in this undertaking as a technological, scientific, and social experiment. Concise texts on the work of the participating artists and an introduction by curators Suad Garayeva-Maleki and Heike Munder round out this illustrated volume.
"Net Pioneers 1.0 discusses media art history with a new, interdisciplinary look at the historical, social, and economic dynamics of our contemporary, networked society.The hype around Net-based art began in the early 1990s, before the Internet had become a commodity. It developed in skeptical parallel to the rise and decline of the new economy. But why does this chapter of art history appear to end so suddenly? Is it that the idea of Net-based art involving itself in a revolutionary spirit in a networked society failed? One might equally well argue that it was far too successful simply to become another media-art genre. Looking today at the social, aesthetic, and conceptual approaches of the early 1990s presented in this book, it is clear that most of them have in fact come true, if in ways other than intended.The contributions cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from art-scholarly methodological debate (Bentkowska-Kafel, Kuni), source-critical analysis (Reisinger), archiving, exhibition, and analytical practice (Ernst, London, Paul, Sakrowski) to media-philosophical aspects (Ries) and technical and artistic innovations (Daniels)."--Résumé de l'éditeur
Since the mid-1990s, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have worked together in the visual arts and cinema, shooting documentaries and fiction such as I Want To See, starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué and screened at the Cannes Festival in 2008.Their practice in both fields is imbued with a distinctive aesthetic that occupies spheres of the visible and the fictional, nourishing a fascinating back and forth between life and fiction. Investigative processes, excavation, and the representations of historic, social, cultural, and political factors are at the heart of their practice.Following the duo's different bodies of work since the early psycho-geographic mapping of Beirut to the recent projects gathered together under the title Lebanese Rocket Society, this book is the first monograph dedicated to the artists.
