At the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige present Remembering the Light, a multilayered exhibition that traverses geological time, personal memory, and political history. The show unfolds as a journey through immersive installations, sculptures, video works, and experimental forms that reflect on archaeology, vertigo of times, poetry, and the enduring nature of images. Spanning nearly a decade of research (2016–2025), the project explores what lies beneath our feet—literally and metaphorically—through collaborations with archaeologists, poets, and scientists.
Anastasia Nysten (AN) and Rima Nasser (RN) sat down with the artists to delve into the genesis, conceptual layering, and emotional resonance of the show.
AN: Could you tell us about the overall experience you wanted to create for visitors to this exhibition?
Joana Hadjithomas (JH): To us, an exhibition isn’t just about seeing—it’s about experiencing something fully, and experiences naturally take time. We would love people to stay in the exhibition, maybe come back, watch a video, try to look at the work from another perspective. Many works deal with question of vision, magnifying some traces or make you see what is under our feet, in the exact place where we stand, in the undergrounds of the neighborhood of the Sursock Museum. It creates a way of seeing that surpasses human vision, crafting a representation of time at once concrete and fantastical. We love stories kept secret, revealing what is usually hidden or what has disappeared from our collective present.
Khalil Joreige (KJ): We designed the exhibition as a kind of journey. From the moment you enter, you’re immersed in elements of archaeology, geology, time, and a feeling of vertigo. The setup is minimal in physical walls—only three were built—while light and colour shape the space. This created multiple paths and rhythms for visitors to explore, leaving the experience open-ended and inviting personal interpretation.
RN: What was the origin of “Remembering the Light”?
JH: The exhibition consists of three major bodies of work that Khalil and I have been developing since 2016. One of the starting points was a project called Unconformities: What Lies Beneath Our Feet. It began with an encounter with an engineer conducting core sampling and analysis before any construction. Khalil was fascinated by the soil cores—those deep vertical exploration into the earth revealing sediment, stone, and layers we rarely get to see, traversing not just history but geological time, long before humanity existed.
To understand these soil samples, we needed guidance, which we found in an archaeologist who helped us interpret what we were looking at. This shaped the early stages of the project and led to the creation of our first video work in the show, Palampsests, exploring this vertiginous sense of geological time.
As we followed the archaeologist to various excavation sites, we became particularly captivated by one in Tabarja. They were working against the clock—bulldozers were destroying the site—so one archaeologist began imprinting the ground with textile-like methods to preserve a trace. That gesture stayed with us. We had photographs of these imprints in our studio for years unsure how to use them but we were fascinated by them because of the story those stones and this soil were conveying.
After the Beirut port blast in 2020 destroyed our studio, we almost abandoned the project, but through conversations with friends, including Etel Adnan, we started thinking of tapestry as a way of repair. It’s a medium of weaving and restoring—like memory. We then worked with the Textile Museum in the Netherlands for nearly two years, developing techniques to create an illusion of depth using only two-dimensional threads.
KJ: The idea for the tapestries came from the soil imprints made at the Tabarja excavation. The challenge became how to give a third dimension using just two-dimensional threads. We experimented with yarn tensions to create that illusion, opening a new chapter in our work where we interrogate the medium itself, as we always do.
RN: You also included older works like “180 seconds of lasting images” and “Khiam”. How do they connect with this exhibition?
JH: That was suggested by Karina El Helou, the curator. She felt it important to show how certain images persist—how they resist disappearance over time. So, we included two works that deal with that idea: the first one is 180 Seconds of Lasting Images and the second is Khiam. They reveal ghostly presence, latency, and the resilience of images.
KJ: For instance, 180 Seconds is made from undeveloped film reels found in my uncle’s archives – he was kidnapped and disappeared, like 17 000 other missing people. The film was latent for decades. To reveal its images, we had to go through intense restoration. The final video contains 4,500 image fragments across three minutes. You have to come close to really see what’s there. It speaks to unresolved memory and absence.
In Khiam, we filmed six former detainees who had just been released from a detention camp in southern Lebanon then occupied by Israel. Sonia, Afif, Soha, Rajaé, Kifah, and Neeman, who had been detained for over ten years, describe in detail their daily lives and how they survived, slept and dreamt between the four walls of a 180 x 80 cm cell, marked by violence and dehumanization. In secret, they crafted artistic objects even if never considering themselves artists. As a means of survival, resistance, and preserving their humanity what those kinds of camps try to annihilate.
RN: There is also a video called “Sarcophagus of Drunken Loves” shot in the national museum of Beirut. What does that piece signify?
JH: During the summer of 2022, the museum had no electricity, like the rest of the country, yet it stayed open as a message of hope. People visited, using their phone flashlights to see. We went on a visit with our children and were deeply moved – it became a quiet act of resistance. Despite everything, people wanted to continue seeing.
KJ: What struck us was that by using their lights, they also created shadows. The shadows animated the museum artifacts in new ways. It was another layer of seeing—creating a kind of poetics of fragility and resilience.
JH: We also shot Where Is My Mind? in a room in the museum full of headless statues and, with all the heads gathered in another room. It made us think about identity, about what is lost or dismembered. We added a voice over reciting a poem of Georges Seferis about loss and recovery. It is part of a larger ongoing series called I Stared at Beauty So Much inspired by poets such as Constantin Cavafy, Etel Adnan, or Orpheus. Poetry becomes a means of confronting chaos.
AN: You’ve worked on this project from 2016 to 2025. How has your perspective changed over time?
KJ: Like many Lebanese, we lived through multiple ruptures—economic collapse, the explosion, personal losses. Much of this project is about how to continue after a rupture. That’s the core idea of Unconformities, which in geology means a temporal gap—two sequences that aren’t meant to meet, but do, and this meeting creates a renewal. It is all about cycles of destruction, disasters but also regeneration.
JH: That concept helped us rethink history and narrative. Working with archaeologists changed our relationship to time. We realised history isn’t just layers—it’s actions, by non-linear chronologies. Sometimes older things are closer to the surface than newer ones. Our storytelling evolved accordingly.
KJ: We began not knowing where this project would lead, but by digging—literally and metaphorically—we unearthed new ways of thinking. That’s the beauty of inquiry-based work: you follow the thread, and it reshapes you.
RN: What are your next projects? And how might this exhibition continue to live and evolve beyond its current form?
JH: Our main focus right now is to continue nurturing this project. One of our upcoming plans is to launch a public programme over the summer, which will include a series of encounters—these could take the form of discussions, presentations, screenings, or moments of sharing parts of the work we’ve created.
A central idea we’re exploring is the act of collecting sighs through the installation Index of sighs. There’s a strong emphasis today on the need to speak, to communicate, to hold dialogue. But sometimes, dialogue feels impossible. In those moments, a sigh becomes a meaningful gesture—an expression of resistance, of release, of liberation, even a form of communication in itself. We’ll be collecting sighs from people during the exhibition, as part of this process. Ideally, it will culminate in a concert composed entirely from those sighs—layered, textured, and made into something collective and resonant.