Asylum of our Dreams

Asylum of our Dreams, 2025
Video Installation (4K, 25 minutes, format 3.54)
Embroideries (60cm diameter)

 

In Lebanon, many dreams of elsewhere, following invisible migratory cartographies that link specific towns to distant horizons. But from northern Lebanon, these imagined routes often point toward a place heavy with fantasy and collective longing: Australia.

This dream is particularly strong in Bab al-Tabbaneh, one of the poorest areas along the Mediterranean, where Nazih, a friend of artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, grew up. Like many around him, Nazih once planned to leave clandestinely, joining a small group intent on reaching Australia via Indonesia and a perilous sea crossing. At the last moment, he decided not to go. His four companions, Fathi, Mustapha, Mohamad, and Tawfiq, continued without him, sailing into uncertainty.Their journey ended in prolonged confinement on Christmas Island, where Australia’s “elsewhere” remained inaccessible and abstract. Time stretched into endless waiting, a suspended temporality, that Hadjithomas and Joreige evoke by collaborating with five women, most of whom had never travelled, asking them to embroider the sea, transforming waiting into a tactile, collective gesture.Drawing on the very impressive annual forest-to-shore migration of the Christmas Island Red Crab, Asylum of Our Dreams reflects on movement that is arduous, interrupted, and often unsuccessful. Exile exposes global structures of exclusion, systems of control and geopolitical violence. The land is both imagined and denied. Yet the dream endures.