Lina Majdalanie

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the Festival d’Automne à Paris present this programme in co-realisation.

The Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué duo presents two “non-academic conferences” and a concert-performance in collaboration with Rima Khcheich. Rabih Mroué makes frequent use of the former concept in order to create presentations which adopt the various mechanisms of the conference format whilst opening them up to the various possibilities of performance. In doing so, the duo plays upon the ambiguity which is inherent in this form of subversion. Added to this, for the first time, is an artistic proposition featuring poems set to music.

In the Appendice (2007) conference, Lina Majdalanie confronts herself with her unattainable wish to be cremated upon her death. In Lebanon, funeral rituals are exclusively managed by the different religious authorities, and the practice of cremation is against the law. How can we find the alternative means to arrive at our ends?

Lebanese actress, author and director living in Berlin, Lina Majdalanie has written and directed several plays, including Biokhraphia (2002), Appendice (2007), Photo-Romance (2009), 33 rpm and a few seconds (2012), Borborygmus (2019), Sunny Sunday (2020) and Hartaqāt (2023) in collaboration with Rabih Mroué. She also directed the video I had a dream, mom in 2006 and Lina Saneh Body P-Arts Project, a website project (2007) transformed into an installation in 2009. Her work questions citizenship, the place of the human being in the public space, and, more specifically, that of the body in the era of globalization, the Internet, the virtual image and the surveillance society. Lina Majdalanie also serves as curator for projects such as Motion-Less (Tanz-quartier, Vienna, 2009), Vues (Kunsthalle, Mulhouse, 2015), Beyond Beirut (Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 2016), Relatively universal (HAU, Berlin, 2017) and No One’s Land (Claiming Common Spaces V, Mousonturm-Frankfurt, 2023). She taught at different universities in Beirut and at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva from 2008 to 2013, at DasArts in Amsterdam in 2012 and at Goethe University in Frankfurt, in 2016 and 2021.