Rabih mroue biography of barack
•
Rabih Mroué
ALTHOUGH WIDELY KNOWN for his performance pieces that build imaginative scenarios revisiting his country’s traumatic civil war (1975–90), the Lebanese director, playwright, actor, and artist Rabih Mroué has only now gained his first solo show. We can credit BAK curator Cosmin Costinas for this exhibition of Mroué’s videos and installations, which, owing to their wit and philosophical depth, confirmed his status among the leading figures of his generation of Beiruti artists.
Not surprisingly, given Mroué’s primary association with stage appearances, the strongest pieces here were concise videos that similarly feature the artist inquisitively challenging the line between being and performing, remembering and inventing. The double-channel installation I, the Undersigned, 2007, presents the artist apologizing for his part in the war, with one screen showing Mroué gazing earnestly into the camera, the other offering an
•
Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué explores a variety of topics through his artworks in A Leap Year
Five bulky old analogue televisions stand atop white plinths in the cavernous front room of Beirut’s Sfeir-Semler Gallery. On their screens, static crackles and fizzes. One is covered with flickering white specks like falling snow, others with jagged lines moving horizontally or vertically across the screen.
A text nearby explains that the footage was recorded by artist Rabih Mroué’s aunt, who believed it to be a code conveying secret messages from “the enemies of Lebanon”. She was so convinced of this, it continues, she hired a professional code-breaker to try to decode the communications – he always failed.
Beneath each TV, a smaller text details the date and time the static was recorded – spanning from 1976 to 2008 – the channel and programme that was interrupted and the reason for the break in connection, including attacks on the TV stations.
Also displayed are the code-breaker’s let
•
The historical context for Jamal al-Sati’s video centres around the guerilla war that the National Resistance Front was then fighting against Israeli forces in South Lebanon, a war that began with the Israeli occupation of approximately 12% of Lebanese territory in 1978, with the pretext of providing security to the north of Israel.1 In the film, al-Sati explains how he became radicalised after experiencing first-hand the indignities of occupation in his home village of Kamed el-Lawz:
I saw how our enemies, the Zionists, destroyed our villages and towns; they humiliated us, forced our people to leave their houses and villages ... As a communist, I decided to regain my national pride and dignity, and so I became a member of the Lebanese National Resistance Front – the Front that enlightened the way to freedom and national dignity for millions of people.
Al-Sati signs off the video by greeting all the martyrs of the Communist Party and the resistance, before payi