Latent Images

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige explore the archive and the document as tools for representing trauma, specifically their personal experience of the devastating Lebanese Civil War. In this installation, the artists confront the titular images in a variety of ways, structuring their project around the biography of a fictitious aging photographer named Abdallah Farah, who has been recording the changing cultural and political landscape of Beirut. The work’s centerpiece is a book containing rolls of film that picture Lebanon’s war years. We do not see the rolls’ visual content, but are instead presented with meticulous written descriptions that are contextualized as having been taken from the photographer’s notebook. Hadjithomas and Joreige thereby explore the limitations of the image by evoking its erasure.