Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige

"Since the mid-1990s, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (b. 1969, live and work in Beirut and Paris) have worked together in the visual arts and in cinema, making documentaries and narrative films. In 2008, they presented their narrative feature I Want to See, starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué at the Festival de Cannes. In 2012, they completed their documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society. Their practice in both fields is imbued with a distinctive aesthetic that occupies spheres of the visible and the fictional, fostering 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. In their words: "All our work exists on the frontier of a reality where the question of the territory and its delimitation (that of art, that of personal life), the question of the social body and the individual body, are constantly being posed." This first monograph dedicated to these artists is a generously illustrated publication tracing the duo's bodies of work from the early psycho-geographic mapping of Beirut to recent projects gathered together under the title Lebanese Rocket Society. Essays by Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, and cinema critic and historian Jean-Michel Frodon, as well as a conversation held by Michèle Thériault, Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, with fellow artists and thinkers (Jalal Toufic, Etel Adnan, Dominique Abensour, etc.), explore the numerous themes of their practice." -- Publisher's website

E-flux Journal Reader 2009

"Since Conceptualism, the field of art has become increasingly accustomed to playing host to its own critique, and recent decades have seen institutions engaged in self-critique as if by mandate. Important notions of legibility, autonomy, and critical engagement that were once necessary to carve out a space for a critic or critical art publication have transposed themselves onto artistic production proper, and are now considered to be of equal importance to artist, curator, institution, and engaged audience member alike. This has made the distance that was once the bedrock of criticism increasingly hard to come by, compounded by the fact that those same institutions have been faced with an entirely widened base of audiences and professionals, who now come to the sphere of art from diverse fields and locations, invariably entering and leaving it as they wish. This climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal has made the art world a highly complex place—the objective position that once defined the role of a critic has been effectively replaced by a need to understand just how large and varied the whole thing has become. The urgent task has now become to engage the new intellectual territories in a way that can revitalize the critical vocabulary of contemporary art. Perhaps the most productive way of doing this is through a fresh approach to the function of an art journal as something that situates the multitude of what is currently available, and makes that available back to the multitude. The selection of essays included in this book seeks to highlight an ongoing topical thread that ran throughout the first eight issues of e-flux journal—a sequence of overlapping concerns passed on from one contribution to the next. While it is our hope that the essays included here can begin to give a sense of how varied the concerns and urgencies being engaged today are, we also expect that certain consistencies and overarching issues will emerge through them, and help us shape the forthcoming editions of the journal." -- Publisher's website

Interarchive : Archivarische Praktiken und Handlungsräumr im zeitgenössischen Kunstfeld = Interarchive : Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field

The archive is examined as facility and metaphor in this publication documenting the exhibition-project “Interarchiv” organised by Obrist and Feldmann in co-operation with the Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg. In the book’s three sections, the first documents the exhibition and its organisation, the second contains reflections on the archive from different disciplinary perspectives, and the third presents 63 instances of contemporary archiving practices in the field of art. Texts in German and English, with three in French and German. Biographical notes. Circa 500 bibl. ref