... "Tels des oasis dans le désert"

It is in the Église des Célestins, a primal space in which the sacred is made up of bareness and simplicity, that Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige install their images and sounds in the form of projections, light boxes and suspended photos, between obsessive presence, mute absence and the bursting of lost bullets. Images that are part of Lebanon's life. In them, we read the problematic memory of this country and the complexity of its identity. To only mention a few of the works that will compose this exhibition: the double film Khiam 2000-2007, the name of a detention camp in Southern Lebanon, which was occupied at the time by Israel. In 1999, when there was no image of this prison, six former inmates who had just been freed testified facing the camera about their detention conditions, their way of surviving through tiny artistic projects carried out quite clandestinely. Liberated in 2000, transformed into a museum, the Khiam camp was completely destroyed by the war in July 2006: today, the question has been raised of rebuilding it true to the original. Eight years after their release, the same six former prisoners evoke the liberation, then the destruction of the camp, memory, reconstitution and the power of the image. The Église des Célestins thus seems to fully resonate with what has driven Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige for years: retaining the traces, questioning what is seen, what is not seen, making the invisible speak, rendering it faithfully, but also calling up the ghosts to question Lebanon's present. The work they carry out there, based on their heavily laden past, their current latencies, their present, their little stories kept secret, their “heroes”, is made up of sensations that challenge the spectator's acquired knowledge, shift and displace his viewpoint. In the extraordinary atmosphere of this Avignon church, they will compare their work in quest of history to a memory-laden site, their reflection on ruins and traces to an edifice itself in ruins that has the authority of vestiges. An exhibition like a dialogue, a correspondence, a meeting between this place and certain works that have already been produced, or will be on this occasion, to see what this engenders, in the hope of giving birth to what Hannah Arendt calls “instants of truths (...) like oases in the desert”.

conception and realisation: Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

production: Festival d'Avignon