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  • Rabih Mroué, Noiseless (Missing People), 2008

    Rabih Mroué, Noiseless (Missing People), 2008

  • Rabih Mroué, I, The Undersigned (2007)

    Rabih Mroué, I, The Undersigned (2007)

  • Rabih Mroué, Noiseless (2008)

    Rabih Mroué, Noiseless (2008)

  • Rabih Mroué, Face A Face B (2001)

    Rabih Mroué, Face A Face B (2001)

  • Rabih Mroué, On Three Posters (Reflection on a performance in video with writer Elias Khoury) (2000)

    Rabih Mroué, On Three Posters (Reflection on a performance in video with writer Elias Khoury) (2000)


Rabih Mroué (Beirut)


January 6 to February 4, 2011

Fernand-Seguin Theater of the Cinémathèque québécoise

In a re-established order. Nothing more can happen to me except to exist. – Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

Rabih Mroué began his artistic career in the 1990s in post-war Lebanon. His work, organised around the representation of memory, both individual and collective, is in the end an exploration of the value of truth, fact and fiction, their representation and by extension their mediation. In the video works presented here, Mroué plays the role of a witness, a chronicler and a narrator who places the artist’s role in a socio-political context taken to its paroxysm by an absence of consensus on both the past and the future of his country.

Employing a keenly up-to-date discourse on representation, Mroué raises the question of realism and the various forms of mediation between the subject and content and between the instigator of the representation—or his or her embodiment—and the world. Mroué’s work dissects, deconstructs and accentuates bits and pieces of Lebanon’s recent past and, by confusing the paths between individual and collective identity, eliminates all tangible traces of them. Essentially, he tries to make sense of the present rather than of history by adopting a deliberately subjective position, one always close to his personal history. By giving form to politics on an aesthetic level, Mroué proposes an alternative to history, a bifurcation of history outside the usual—or authorised—narrative systems, which run in opposition to what many people describe as official “selective amnesia”. An alternative to history that is also suited, because it contextualises today’s violence, to counterbalancing the partial media coverage of Western countries. How other than through a mediated subjectivity to tell the story of a repressed, recurring violence? A violence that permeates everyday life and cunningly perpetrates a climate of uncertainty and anxiety. An anxiety that does not necessarily emanate from war or a memory of war, from a grieving present, but rather from the institutionalisation of methods of documenting history which are presented as objective depictions.

It is thus not the present-day quality of the moment described that interests us in Mroué’s work, but rather the mediated and subjective reconstruction of reality, the only thing suited to exposing a kind of truth and to inflect its own legitimacy.

You saw nothing in Hiroshima, nothing. I saw everything. Everything. . . . You saw nothing in Hiroshima. I didn’t make anything up. You made everything up. You saw nothing in Nevers, nothing.

You saw nothing in Beirut, nothing.

Installation, video and banner, Agora of the Cinémathèque québécoise

Noiseless (2008)
A newspaper clipping relates the circumstances of Rabih Mroué’s disappearance. A portrait of the artist, sharing the lot of the disappeared, gradually fades out, between presence and absence, to give way to other disappearances. Painful traces of the past gradually fade away to the point of becoming completely obliterated from socio-political memory.

+ Video program, Fernand-Seguin Cinema
55 minutes, in Arabic with English subtitles

Face A Face B (2001), 10 min
Returning from Cuba in 1978 Manuel, Mroué’s brother, wrote a song set to a Russian tune. He and young Rabih rehearsed it, recorded it, and sent it to their brother Abou Salam, then living in the Soviet Union. A metaphysical film about the nature of memory and knowledge, of sight and sound, of evidence and identity, and of remembrance and survival.

With Soul / With Blood (2003), 11 min
Having dreamt countless times that he was falling without ever hitting the ground, Rabih Mroué hypothesises that if one’s body falls to the ground in a dream then one dies in reality. The artist and writer Jalal Toufic believes instead that if the sleeping body never reaches ground it is because it is cadaveric and, as a result, its fall will go on forever.

I the Undersigned (2007), 7 min
The civil war in Lebanon officially came to an end in 1990, and to this day none of those responsible, some of whom are still in power, has apologised to the Lebanese people. Like many of his fellow citizens, Rabih Mroué has waited for this moment in vain. He thus presents here his own apology for what he did during the war. There is a great deal of difference between a confession and an apology, and this is not a confession.

On Three Posters (Reflection on a performance in video with writer Elias Khoury) (2000), 18 min
A work made out of three “shots” in a video will, originally made for television by a suicide bomber with the Lebanese National Resistance Front (1982-87) just before his suicide bombing. This piece offers thoughts on and discussion of the difficulties encountered by Khoury and Mroué during presentations on stage of On Three Posters.

What We Know of Beginnings (2003), 2 min
Far from the cult of remembrance, from an attempt to create a memorial, this work is founded on representation and narrative as political gestures. Rabih Mroué says of it: I don’t recount events in order to remember. On the contrary, I do it to assure myself that I have forgotten. Or at least to assure myself that I have forgotten certain things, that they have been erased from my memory.


Rabih Mroué (b. 1967) lives and works in Beirut. Mroué is an actor, director, playwright, and visual artist. His complex and diverse practice, spanning different disciplines and formats in between theater, performance, and visual arts, has established Mroué as a key figure in a new generation of artistic voices in Lebanon. Employing both fiction and in-depth analysis as tools for engaging with his immediate reality, Mroué explores the responsibilities of the artist in communicating with an audience in given political and cultural contexts. His works deal with issues that have been swept under the rug in the current political climate of Lebanon, connected to the enduring marks left by the Lebanese Civil War as well as more recent political events. Recent exhibitions include: BAK Utrecht (Netherlands); Performa 09 (New York); 2009 Istanbul Biennial; Queens Museum of Art (New York); Casino Luxembourg, Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Tate Modern (London). In 2010 Mroué was awarded an Artist Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, New York and the Spalding Gray Award.

Dazibao thanks the artist as well as the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery for their generous collaboration and its members for their support.




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