Joyce Joumaa
Joyce Joumaa is a Lebanese Canadian visual artist and writer based between Beirut, Montreal and Amsterdam. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon, as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment. Central to her practice is an interest towards the political charge inscribed in space and the social psychology that unfolds out of this tension. She has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, E-flux Screening Room, CCS Hessel Museum of Art, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennial and the 35th edition of Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Brunette Coleman Gallery, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Eli Kerr Gallery. She is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists and the 2025 Baloise Award.
Works of Centuries
2026
Paper, matchboxes, poplar wood, resin paint, plexiglass
Variable dimensions
Courtesy the artist
Works of Centuries by Joyce Joumaa (b. 1998, Beirut) begins with an epistolary gesture: in 2015, the British art historian and critic John Berger (1926–2017) composed a posthumous letter to German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919). Centering on Berger’s letter, Joumaa’s work contrasts the different ways of experiencing time: Berger writes toward an absent future, while Luxemburg, in her letters from prison from 1918, focuses on the immediacy of birdsong outside her cell, grounding her in the present.
Newly commissioned for the Kyiv Biennial at KW, the installation proposes an alternative archive: neither linear nor fixed, but dispersed across time and geography. The letter, held in a frame, remains as if still in transit. Beside it, an open wooden frame gathers original Soviet matchboxes into a compact grid, where images of songbirds interlace histories of production, exchange, and ideology. Together, these elements form a synergy of moments and places: Berger’s writing desk, Luxemburg’s prison cell, the homes where traces of social histories of resistance remain, and the present exhibition space, making the work one that asks how resistance is remembered, imagined and narrated.
Joumaa is an artist and filmmaker whose research-based practice engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis. Her work locates the political within domestic and mundane objects, treating them not as a neutral ground but as a charged site, where power and future potential are stored and circulated. The matchboxes become containers not only of flames but of narrative, pocket-sized vehicles passing hands, homes, and borders. Below, an enlarged matchstick interrupts this scale. Stripped of use, the objects evoke a suspended event: ignition deferred, history held just before combustion. Joumaa’s Works of Centuries holds the potential to kindle a future political flame.
Works of Centuries references John Berger, “A Letter to Rosa Luxemburg” (2015), first published in The New Statesman. Courtesy of the publisher.