This major new exhibition from Beirut-based artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige explores the history of online spam and scamming through film, sculpture, photography and installation.
Giving a face to the ambiguous and hidden voices found in junk email, Hadjithomas and Joreige create an immersive world that seeks to challenge how ideology is constructed. How do we develop intimacy and proximity with individuals whom we have never met? How are systems of belief valued? The artists map out a genealogy of online scamming, revealing a complex world where greed and desire question traditional ethics. As the narrative unfolds, a new colonial map of the world is presented, one where the victim and the scammer have very paradoxical relations. Through these tales, a map emerges, a chronicle of conflicts, a strange history of our contemporary time but also a place of singular encounters and poetic experiences.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige collaborate as filmmakers and artists, producing cinematic and visual artwork that interwine. For the last 15 years, they have focused on the images, representations and history of their home country, Lebanon. together, they have directed documentaries and feature films including Je Veux Voir (I Want to See), starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroue, and in 2013, The Lebanese Rocket Society, the strange tale of the Lebanese space race and a series of artistic installations around the space project of the 1960s.
A publication The Rumours of the World: Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet edited by Omar Kholeif will be produced for this exhibition.
Artist Khalil Joreige talks more about the exhibition:
Co-produced by HOME, Villa Arson (Nice), and MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, USA)
