Rabih Mroué

LEBANON, 1967

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The internationally renowned Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué’s performance, theater and video works deal with recent events in the troubled history of his country and are often controversial. (In 2007, the Beirut performance of his play How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke was banned.) His critically acclaimed Looking for a Missing Employee (2003) takes the stories, rumors and accusations surrounding the disappearance of a civil servant as an occasion to construct a wide-ranging critique of journalistic practices and the mass media. Make Me Stop Smoking (2006), in which an examination of the artist’s archival desires leads to a reflection on the effects of Lebanon’s war, exemplifies Mroué’s adroit mixture of formal inventiveness, existential drama, sociopolitical analysis and canny humor.

In 1990, he began putting on his own plays, performances and videos. Continuously searching for new and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of the theater art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theater and the relationship between space and form of the performance and, consequently, questions how the performer relates with the audience. His works deal with issues that have been swept under the table in the current political climate of Lebanon. He draws much-needed attention to the broader political and economic contexts through semidocumentary theater.

From theater practice to politics, and from the problem of representations to his private life, his search for “truth” begins via documents, photos and found objects, fabricating other documents, other “truths”: It is as if the work becomes a dissection table for the dubious processes of Lebanon’s war society. With the accumulation of materials, a surrealistic saga unfolds, teasing out the proposition that “between the truth and a lie, there is but a hair.” His pieces are an investigative performance in which the artist becomes a kind of detective, interested in using actual documents to understand how rumors, public accusations, national political conflicts and scandals act on the public sphere as shaped by print media. Mroué incorporates radical criticism, particularly in his video imagery.

Courtesy of Rabih Mroué