Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have spent the last three decades elaborating a research-based multimedia practice that confronts the inescapability of the real and the emancipatory strength of image-making, fiction and poetry. They have devoted numerous works to post-civil-war Beirut, which they treat as a critical site for examining how images are formed and received, how stories are told or forgotten, how processes of latency and revelation unfold, and how politics and the sharing of public space shape our existences.
For the Biennale Arte 2026, Hadjithomas and Joreige present Unconformities: What Lies Beneath Our Feet, a constellation of related works that reveal latent histories embedded in the earth. Collaborating with practitioners of rescue archaeology (an approach that requires land be surveyed before being built over for property development), the artists highlight subterranean worlds, through residues collected from sites in France, Greece, Lebanon and Venice. In their words:
this body of works explores the invisible remains of cities buried beneath our contemporary towns, testifying to the impact of human presence on Earth and its traces. It is about shifts in scale and time, uncovering, recycling and covering over again, and how man-made violence and climatic disruptions affect possible narratives.
—Clément Dirié
