Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your cane / Pixelated Revolution Rabih Mroué

NTGent presents a 'double bill' on October 20, with not one but two lecture performances by Rabih Mroué.

BEFORE FALLING SEEK THE ASSISTANCE OF YOUR CANE

A poster at the Salzburg Kunstverein warns of an air raid. A passerby then alerts the police. The police assume that there is an acute threat and begin to evacuate the building. But the poster actually belongs to an exhibition by the media and performance artist Rabih Mroué. It is a reproduction of a leaflet dropped by the U.S. Army over Iraq to announce imminent bombings - a practice as common as it is cynical to warn of airstrikes.

In his lecture performance Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane, Rabih Mroué takes the events in Salzburg as an opportunity to raise questions about the relationship between art and the public. How can an artistic object become an object of threat? What are the boundaries between fiction and reality, when the artwork goes outside the art-institution and is in a public space? This issue is raised through the story of the Warning Leaflets that are usually dropped from warplanes.

Masterfully bringing together aesthetic questions with social and political realities, Mroué explores how images and stories are constructed and instrumentalized, merging fiction and reality. 

PIXELATED REVOLUTION 

“Syrians are filming their own death”, that is how Pixelated Revolution  begins, aiming to study the various tips and directions on mobile phone documentation, as shared via the medium of Facebook and other virtual communication tools during the first year’s events of the Syrian revolution.

It begins from the point of how Syrians are recording their images “now and here” and reflects on the relationship of this act of photographic documentation with death, and how we perceive these video “now but there”…