Rabih Mroué

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 Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane (2022), Rabih Mroué questions the nature of works of art in the public space, and in particular those instances when the object in question finds itself in direct contact with the real. Thus, a leaflet dropped into the air by a military plane warning of an imminent bombing, and which is presented in an exhibition, might result in the venue being evacuated by the police.

Rabih Mroué was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1967 and currently lives in Berlin. Actor, director, visual artist and playwright, he has written and directed several plays, including Who’s afraid of representation (2005), How Nancy wished that everything was an April fool’s joke (2007), Photo-Romance (2009), 33 rpm and a few seconds (2012), So little time (2016), Borborygmus (2019), Sunny Sunday (2020) and Hartaqāt (2023) in collaboration with Lina Majdalanie. His work, at the crossroads of theater, performance and visual arts, blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, using videos, photographs and historical documents to challenge the hegemony of archives. He is also a contributing editor to The Drama Review (New York) and is co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). Rabih Mroué was also a member of the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universitat in Berlin in 2013-2014. Then, from 2015 to 2019, he was a director at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Germany. His creations have been presented in many countries, notably at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, at the MoMA in New York and at the Center Pompidou in Paris.