»Before Falling, Seek the Assistance of Your Cane«

Duration: 40 min., short intermission afterwards

A poster at the Kunstverein in Salzburg warns of an air raid. A passer-by sees it and calls the police. They view it as an immediate threat and start to evacuate the building. But the poster is actually part of an exhibition by the media and performance artist Rabih Mroué. It reproduces a leaflet dropped over Iraq by the US Army to give notice of immanent bombing – a practice as common as it is cynical, of providing a warning before an air raid. In his non-academic lecture »Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane« Rabih Mroué uses the events in Salzburg as an example to raise questions about the relationship between art and public life. How can an art object be turned into an object of threat? He masterfully combines aesthetic questions with social and political realities and investigates how images and stories can be constructed and instrumentalised as fiction and reality merge.

»Make me stop smoking«

Duration: 60 min., short intermission afterwards

In his non-academic lecture »Make Me Stop Smoking«, Rabih Mroué reconstructs the radical heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clipping and eyewitness reposts, that he pieces together to create a complex system of meandering narrations. In so doing, he questions the veracity and cogency of the archive documents as much as he negotiates the validity of the reconstruction »reality«. What happens when a lost landscape is re-appropriated through its archived representation?

»Pixelated revolution«

Duration: 60 min.

»Syrians are Filming Their Own Death«, that is how the 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«.