ART-PRESENTATION: Rabih Mroué

“Riding on a Cloud” is a live performance created by the Berlin-based Lebanese artist, actor, and theater director Rabih Mroué, which will be presented tonight at PS1. His work, which merges visual art, performance, and theater, eludes simple disciplinary categories. Drawing from a wide range of influences, he has explored different genealogies of performance, from Brechtian critical theater to contemporary performance art.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA-PS1 Archive

Mroué presents the performance “Riding on a Cloud”, based on his brother Yasser Mroué’s personal experiences in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War. As a young man during the war, Yasser suffered a head injury that resulted in aphasia, a condition that rendered him unable to recognize friends and acquaintances in photographs or other visual representations. Because he was left with this problem of representation, Yasser’s doctor advised that he videotape and photograph his surroundings in an effort to retain an understanding of images and, ultimately, reality. “Riding on a Cloud” combines prerecorded video and spoken word in a “Fictional Meditation” on the relationship between lived experience and representation. Mroué is part of a larger group of artists active in Beirut since the end of the Civil War, in 1990, and the effects of that era’s political strife infuse their work. Mroué uses found documents, video footage, photographs, and objects to reconstruct certain events, employing a narrative of memory and forgetting to create intentional slippages in meaning, and compromising the authority of the archival evidence. This strategy suggests that there are an infinite number of “Truths” and limitless angles from which to consider the same event.

Info: “Riding on a Cloud”, Curating: Ana Janevski & Martha Joseph, The Museum of Modern Art, Theater 1 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1), 11 West 53 Street, N. York, Duration: 21-22/4/15, Time: 7:30pm, www.moma.org