Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

“The Lebanese Rocket Society – A Tribute to Dreamers”

Exhibition review for Art Agenda, April 20, 2013

Excerpt

Much to their surprise, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige recently came across a half-century-old Lebanese postage stamp depicting a rocket emblazoned with a cedar tree. Though enshrined in official history, this inscrutable, fantastic image—seemingly the stuff of science fiction—commemorated an event no one could remember. An enigma, it intrigued the artists enough to do some research. They discovered that between 1960 and 1967, as the global superpowers vied for superiority in the space race, Armenian students at Beirut’s Haigazian University had successfully produced the Middle East’s first rockets intended for space exploration. The Lebanese Rocket Society launched more than ten of what were called “Cedar” rockets (after the country’s national emblem), reaching an altitude of two hundred kilometers with the “Cedar IV” rocket and briefly becoming the pride of a small nation riding the hopeful, modernizing wave of pan-Arabism. The amateur space program fell apart in 1967, and later, with Lebanon besieged by sectarian strife, it was forgotten.

[…] Though the history it charts has dissipated in collective memory, “The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Tribute to Dreamers” is entirely rooted in fact. Hadjithomas and Joreige construct a porous, layered narrative from actual events, opening the field of inquiry outwards from the Lebanese Rocket Society to its cultural context, while accentuating the spectral character this remote subject has acquired. In so doing, the artists generate traces of a past that cannot be historically integrated because it remains, in its fragmentary reconstruction, more potential than real. To be real again, they suggest, this past must first reenter the collective imagination, which has suppressed it since 1967—a “moment of disenchantment,” in the artists’ words, when revolutionary dreams of pan-Arab modernism were defeated.