Ismyrna
by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
3 oct. at 7pm
6 oct. at 3pm
Cinéma Le Mondial
with Etel Adnan, Joana Hadjithomas
Khalil Joreige/Abbout Productions
In coproduction with Jeu de Paume, Paris and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
The painter and poet Etel Adnan and Joana Hadjithomas met 15 years ago. They became close friends, sharing a city that they had never been to: Izmir, in Turkey, formerly known as Smyrna. After the end of the Ottoman Empire, Hadjithomas’s paternal Greek family were forced into exile from Smyrna by the Turkish armies. Adnan’s mother, also a Greek born in Smyrna, married a Syrian officer of the Ottoman army, who was exiled to Lebanon after the fall of the Empire.
Having lived in an imaginary Smyrna, Etel and Joana are now confronted with the transmission of history, questioning their attachment to objects and places, imaginary constructions without images. What should be done with the sorrow of our parents? Even if it constituted us, can we live today out of nostalgia, in an “eternal present”, as Adnan would say? Their personal experiences and the story of their families serve as a prism through which are seen the changes that took place in the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the shifting of borders, the notions of identity, cosmopolitanism and belonging.