Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: Messages with(out) a code

The exhibition presents a Time Capsule and a series of framed works entitled Trilogies which have both been developed from sites in Monastiraki, Athens. In their Time Capsule works, the artists re-sculpted extracted cores from cities and set them within experimental resin, exposing these buried histories in a vertical, cylindrical structure. In Trilogies, the artists photographed the cores which were then given to archaeologists and historians who drew the significant findings. Hadjithomas & Joreige wrote fragments from the stories they were told as possible narratives behind the findings.

Palimpsests is also the title of a short film that takes place over several sites across Beirut, and records the various processes used to create the drilling cores, notably the manner in which the material is sorted in order to determine the suitability of the foundations. Palimpsests plays with scales of time and size; the massive confronts the minuscule, and the viewer passes from the macro to the microscopic.

In 2019, the artists created A State which is a series of three images of a drilling core sourced from a large landfill site in Tripoli, Lebanon that has accumulated waste for over 25 years. This site has radically altered the local landscape, and today forms hills that rise 45 metres above sea level. The treatment of waste is at the centre of questions regarding the inheritance of the planet and what we leave behind.

The exhibition also presents three new tapestry works by Hadjithomas & Joreige titled Messages with(out) a code. Derived from their personal experience on archaeological sites, the artists have witnessed the intricacies of the archaeological process where findings are set on a flat surface, giving a one-dimensional aspect to time itself. Hadjithomas & Joreige were fascinated by this process and, using photography, they documented it and became enthralled by the photographs taken which became the point of departure for these tapestry works.