Rabih Mroué
Through projects spanning the disciplines of theater, performance, music, and visual art, Rabih Mroué (Lebanon, b. 1967) engages with the contemporary politics of the Middle East and the enmeshed history of discord in the region, often drawing from his personal experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Taking many forms, his work often interweaves history, testimony, and storytelling to destabilize facts and fictions. A triptych of projects—the world premiere of the theater work Borborygmus, a gallery installation of new work, and a lecture-performance—were realized by Mroué and presented as part of or in tandem with the Walker’s Out There series (January 2019).
In Borborygmus, a Walker-commissioned dramatic-comic theater piece by Mroué and collaborators Mazen Kerbaj and Lina Majdalanie, the performers’ identities and judgements of one another shift as the taboos, fears, and failures of their lives and countries are laid bare (January 11–12, 2019). Mroué also presented Sand in the Eyes, a lecture-performance on the image politics of Islamist recruiting videos, contrasted with imagery shot by US drones. The gallery presentation Again we are defeated (December 20, 2018–March 1, 2020) highlights Mroué’s latest cycle of artworks, including drawings, collages, and videos, in which the Berlin-based artist considers the repeated cycles of violence affecting people of the Middle East by examining his own encounters with the conflict as mediated through the news. As the artist serially tracks the recurring impressions of conflict, the works form an homage to the phantom presence of the dead.
Projects
- Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué: Borborygmus
- Rabih Mroué: Again we are defeated
- Lecture/Performance: Sand in the Eyes
Learn More
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Testimony for the Living (Or, Metabolic Theater)
“Borborygmus is predicated on relentless narratives—personal, impersonal, fictional, true—of each actor’s lived experiences, memories, and mismemories. It is in these narratives that we can locate, actually, not merely the facts surrounding violent acts, but the effects of violence upon the entire social body, its nervous system.” With particular attention to affective and metabolic processes, scholar André Lepecki reviews Borborgymous, a new theater work about “life, death and the digestive system” by Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué, which premiered at the Walker in January.
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Rabih Mroué: Life, Death, and the Digestive System
“It’s not about remembering or forgetting. It is about both together, and how they work together—how we remember, how we forget, what we invent, what we remember.” Rabih Mroué discusses his three-part series: his cycle of artworks, Again we are defeated; the “non-academic lecture” Sand in the Eyes, and Borborygmous, a Walker-commissioned performance that takes its title from the name for the rumbling of the stomach.
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Watch: Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué in Conversation with Allie Tepper
“It’s not about the particular experience of being from Beirut, and having experienced the war in Lebanon: it’s a history of humanity and mankind.” In a wide-ranging discussion with the performance’s co-curator, Allie Tepper, Berlin-based artists Mazen Kerbaj, Lina Majdalanie, and Rabih Mroué discuss the perpetual failures of the living in the midst of global sociopolitical upheaval, absurdity and hope, and the collaborative process that went into the making of the Walker commission, Borborygmous, on the heels of its premiere.
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