Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

They are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents and their particular interest in the traces of the invisible and the absent, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of Internet scams or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities.They occasionally use explicit life events as subjects for their work, such as the kidnapping and disappearance of Joreige's uncle, Alfred Junior Kettaneh, or Hadjithomas's paternal origins in the documentary ISMYRNA, with the poet and painter Etel Adnan.[18] The installation constituted of core samples that had been collected over the past three years, underneath the cities omnipresent in the artists' history and thinking: Athens, Paris and Beirut.Over the course of many exhibitions and installations, Hadjithomas and Joreige created an itinerary around these modern day scams, and traced their history back to the literary tradition known as The Jerusalem Letter.The series focuses on the place where fiction and real modes intersect and blur; and in 2017, they started developing the art project Unconformities which unveils the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities.Under The Cold River Bed (2020) is their latest installation, as part of Unconformities, and tells the story of the "Nahr el Bared" refugee camp in the North of Beirut which was destroyed in 2007, leaving more than 30,000 people homeless.A decision was taken, with a lot of controversy, to backfill the entire camp and seal it as a sarcophagus, protecting the archeological discoveries with a gigantic geo-textile and covering it with a concrete screed."The sculpture presented by the artists shows the thin membrane between the past and the future, an imprint of the sarcophagus of the camp, while documents tell its archeological, human and military history, its destruction, and its reconstruction.".[36] Prix Georges de Beauregard pour Khiam, FID Marseille[37] 2005 Fipresci Prize and Don Quixote Award for A Perfect Day, Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland.