Artist duo uncover hidden histories below ground in new Dubai show

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's exhibition Messages with(out) a code, on at The Third Line gallery, shows samples from deep within the Earth that reveal the subterranean worlds of cities

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's digital photography work 'A State — Borehole 1' (2019), on view as part of the show. Photo: The Third Line

In geology, the term “unconformity” refers to an interruption in the Earth’s geological record. It is a time-based gap between two strata, a break in the record of rocks that can be caused by various factors, including erosion, natural disasters and sea-level changes.

This means that two layers of sediment ages apart — 200 million years, for example — can come into contact with each other, leaving a hiatus in between.

Poetically, artist duo and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige think of these intervals as “temporal ruptures”, pockets of missing or unaccounted time and history.

They have borrowed the term “unconformities” as the title of their ongoing project, which uses core samples extracted from the Earth as a way to think about urban memory and alternative historical narratives within manmade environments.

The works from the project — video, photography and installation — have been brought together by The Third Line for the exhibition Messages with(out) a code, on view at the Dubai gallery’s newly renovated space until April 26.

Unconformities began after Hadjithomas and Joreige were invited by a friend, engineer Philippe Fayad, who analyses soil for real estate developments, to join him on one of the drilling excursions at a construction site.

The process involves the insertion of hollow steel cubes into the ground to draw out a cylindrical section of the Earth’s substance. The materials are then laid out according to their layers and can be studied for various purposes.

“The moment we arrived, we saw those core samples in those boxes. We felt that this was a connection with everything that’s underneath our feet. It makes visible all that is invisible,” Hadjithomas says.

She and Joreige followed Fayad to various sites, eventually expanding the project to retrieve and photograph core samples in Beirut, Paris and Athens, cities that have particular significance for the artists’ practices.

Hadjithomas and Joreige were born in Beirut and split their time living between the Lebanese capital and Paris. They have been frequenting Athens after producing a film there in 2013.

The exhibition includes the short film Palimpsests, which was shot in several sites across Beirut and documents the process of core drilling and sorting.

Interspersing drone shots of the site and views of the city’s built landscape with close-ups of the core samples, the film contemplates Beirut’s visible and underground textures.

The magnified fragments of soil and shell hint at several unknown stories as workers present chips of baked clay, food seeds, and even human bones and teeth.

“There are no roots, thus it could be suggested that these are the teeth of a teenager or child, not [an] adult,” says one of the men in the video.

Dangling from the gallery’s ceiling is one of the artists’ Time Capsules works, made of suspended core samples in resin. These cylinders are another way of shedding light on the otherwise invisible or hidden.

Working with geologists and archaeologists, the duo have also resculpted the stones and sediments to excavate the histories embedded within them.

In Trilogies, they have asked experts to select samples and identify clues as to what they might have been. These framed studies feature three parts: a photograph of the sample followed by an archaeological illustration and written details on location, date, drilling depth and the artist’s own interpretation of the material.

“We create possible narratives based on what the archaeologists and prehistorians see, but it’s linked to something more poetic, not scientific,” Hadjithomas explains.

Here, the imaginary takes over as the artists question linear approaches to history, as well as the rewriting of the past. Answers to these mysteries don’t come easy, and it has been part of the duo’s practice, including in their films, to explore the truth beyond official histories, facts and materials.

In their 2000 documentary Khiam, for example, they interview former prisoners of the Khiam prison camp established by Israel during its occupation of Southern Lebanon.

The subjects seem to recall every detail of their jail cells, torture and daily lives, but it is clear that when factual elements do fail, personal testimony clarifies and sharpens.

Similarly, the artists’ documentary Ismyrne / Ismyrna (2016) on the late Etel Adnan investigates the transmission of memory through family history. Both Hadjithomas and Adnan attempt to reconstruct the city of Izmir, formerly Smyrna, a place they had never been, but had held such significance to their families.

When it comes to soil and sediment, what histories can be revealed and translated to us? And what happens when, such as in Unconformities , these stories are dissolved between spaces?

Their textile work Message with(out) a code attempts to address such concerns. Working with weavers, the artists have produced tapestries based on aerial photographs of soil and stone, laid out on the drilling sites.

The original photographs were damaged during the Beirut port blast in August 2020, making the woven versions a form of restoration and recovery.

Contrasting the softness of the textile with the hard stone that the tapestries depict, the artists are also working towards a reinterpretation of what once was.

Meanwhile, the photographic series A State, from 2019, shows three images of core samples drilled from a landfill site in Tripoli, where mounds of rubbish — now rising at 45 metres above sea level — have been around for more than 25 years.

We don’t see the landscape or the piles of trash, but we can imagine them from the abstracted parts within these images: bits of coloured plastic entangled with rocks.

“For 25 years, this garbage has accumulated without being recycled. The garbage has become like ‘technofossils’, they show what we as humans are leaving behind,” Hadjithomas explains.

In this work, the artists not only present ecological concerns, but also ideas of temporality. “After five or six metres, human presence disappears [in the samples]. We arrive at geology,” she says.

For the artists, there is more than one way to tell time. And more than one way to read history. In the grander scheme of space and existence, human presence is minimal. Cycles of life have come before us and will come after us, a sliver of comfort in seemingly apocalyptic times.

“It’s always about balance, destruction... It gives you this idea that it’s a continuous cycle, we are part of it,” Hadjithomas says.

Messages with(out) a code is on view at The Third Line, Dubai until April 26. More information is on thethirdline.com