Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, both born in 1969 in Beirut, collaborate on films, photographs, and installations, often using cinematic fragments to examine the power of absence. They are concerned with the emergence and disappearance of images, particularly archival documents of the effects of the fifteen-year civil war in their homeland that began in 1976. Combining personal histories and political activism, Hadjithomas and Joreige apply a documentary approach to exploring the potency of visual remains. The Circle of Confusion (1997) is an installation of small rectangles arranged into an aerial image of the Beirut of the time. Exhibition visitors are invited to remove each rectangle, revealing a mirror behind each detail. This process was transformed into the film History of the Circle of Confusion (2009), which shows the image gradually disappearing as the pieces are withdrawn. In this way Hadjithomas and Joreige pursue a commitment to documenting their besieged city. Lasting Images (2003) uses three minutes of undeveloped, found Super 8 film footage shot by Joreige’s uncle before he was abducted in 1985 during the civil war. The badly damaged film, developed fifteen years later, reveals ghostly figures in a washed-out landscape. With this piece, Hadjithomas and Joreige examine the visual remains of Joreige’s relative in an attempt to understand his interpretation of his surroundings. Khiam 2000–2007 (2008), a dual video projection, is a collection of testimonies from former prisoners of the Khiam detention camp in South Lebanon. The detainees were freed in 2000 and the camp turned into a museum, only to be destroyed six years later during the war. The video presents interviews conducted in 1999 and again in 2007 to prompt recollections on the liberation and destruction of the camp. The work highlights the prisoners’ feelings of regret that the transformation and eventual decimation of the site erased the social memory of the realities they suffered. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s work has been featured in solo presentations at venues including the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2008–09); Beirut Exhibition Center (2012); The Third Line, Dubai (2012); and HOME, Manchester (2015). They have participated in group exhibitions at White Box Kunsthalle, Munich (2011); Beirut Art Center (2011); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2011); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2012); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2013); Singapore Art Museum (2013), and Villa Arson-École Nationale Supérieure d’Art (2014), Nice. They also participated in the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2011); Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2012) and Venice Biennale: All the Word’s Futures (2015). Hadjithomas and Joreige have been awarded numerous prizes for their collaborations in film, including the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2017). In 2008 I Want To See (Je veux voir, 2008) was selected as the Best Film Singulier at the Cannes International Film Festival. That same year, Khiam 2000–2007 (2008) won the International Competition Prize at the FID International Film Festival, Marseille. Hadjithomas and Joreige live and work in Beirut and Paris.