Lamia Joreige
Lebanon
For me it was like an obsession. I was three when the war started, so the only thing I wanted to do as an artist was talk about what happened and the experience of it… Maybe in the early years of my work, I was interested in rendering a portrait of the city, with the idea that I could possi...
Born in Beirut in 1972, Lamia Joreige is a visual artist and film-maker who lives and works in Beirut. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting and filmmaking. She uses archival documents and elements of fiction to reflect on history and its possible narration, and on the relationship between individual stories and collective memory. In her practice, rooted in her country’s experience, she explores the possibilities of representing the Lebanese wars and their aftermath. Her work is essentially on time, the recordings of its trace, and its effects on us.
“For as long as she has been an artist, Joreige has had a primary instinct to make a diagnosis about her surroundings, regardless of whether or not her subject—that is, Lebanon—is living, dead, or in a halfway state like a zombie. As she said, “For me it was like an obsession. I was three when the war started, so the only thing I wanted to do as an artist was talk about what happened and the experience of it.”- Art Asia Pacific by HG Masters
Artist Statement
For me it was like an obsession. I was three when the war started, so the only thing I wanted to do as an artist was talk about what happened and the experience of it… Maybe in the early years of my work, I was interested in rendering a portrait of the city, with the idea that I could possibly represent it in both fragmented narratives and portraits, but it was always more about the idea of representation itself… There’s no contradiction, for me, between a portrait of a place and a narrative that comes from a place
