Artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s solo exhibition, “Messages With(out) a Code”, is held at The Third Line until April 9, 2022. The exhibition reveals a selection of new and seminal pieces from the artists’ ongoing project “Unconformities”, which began in 2016 when the artists started gathering a series of earth core samples, showing the subterranean worlds of cities omnipresent in their personal imaginaries: Athens, Paris, Beirut and Tripoli.
“We’ve always been interested by history, its representations, its rewritings, and the constructions of the “imaginary”. In this project, it started with an encounter with a friend, Philippe Fayad, who drills soil and analyses it for real estate projects. We started to go to construction sites with him and, suddenly, we had access to what lies beneath our feet. We are fascinated by these cores, stones and residues that are brought up from deep in the earth and put into chronological order in boxes,” say Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
“Messages With(out) a Code” is being presented in parallel with Hadjithomas & Joreige’s three-week film retrospective at Cinema Akil running from 3rd – 23rd March, 2022.
“In these cores, history appears as complex actions, a diverse mix of traces, epochs, and civilisations. It is a constant cycle of destruction and construction, catastrophe and regeneration… Cities mix, erase, bury and recycle the same stones over and again… as a vertiginous palimpsest,” say Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
The exhibition proudly debuts The Third Line’s newly renovated space, which is being unveiled alongside this show.
Founded in 2005, The Third Line is a Dubai-based gallery that represents contemporary artists locally, regionally, and internationally. A pioneering platform for established talent and emerging voices from the region and its diaspora, The Third Line has built a dynamic program that explores the diversity of practice in the region.
The exhibition is accompanied by an interview with writer and curator Shumon Basar and the artists, where they delve into the motivation behind this body of work.
