Mourning Images

Rabih Mroué has been active for many years in both the fields of performing and visual arts. He built an impressive oeuvre challenging the limits between both disciplines in an ongoing artistic research on the mediation of images in times of revolution, devastation and war. For Images Mon Amour, hisfirst solo exhibition in Belgium, Extra City art center in Antwerp, brings together a fine selection of his work in a desecrated Dominican church, that together defy the ill-fated impossibility to escape the ever expanding, endless war and its unfolding catastrophe.

Ceaselessly grappling with the unimaginable root causes of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), he deconstructs the way in which truth is fabricated and remembered at different particular times and moments in history. Since 9/11, he is laboring the difficulties of translatability for western audiences, and anticipating different forms of appropriation by western media, challenging the autonomy of his work. In the fabricated shots and counter shots of the never-ending ‘war on terror’, both the distant and artificial image of the hero, and the embodied tangible image of the villain, mirror each other in their interminable representation of death, disaster and decay. Through an in-depth refection on contentious forms of image-making, he manages to anticipate the more generalized fictional and performative construction of reality in contemporary at times confusing post-truth politics.

Most of the works in Images Mon Amour are remarkably re-assembled images and drawing selected out of his archive, made of newspaper clippings, digital photos and stills collected between 2006 and 2016, from the Israeli invasion in Lebanon, to the end of the so called Arab Spring and the generalized internationalization of the war in Syria. Walking a thin line between the realist impulse and the fictional appeal animating his artistic research, he invites us to more sensuous ways of knowing and feeling the invading images of revolution, devastation and war. In this way he makes intimate what is rendered distant, and renders tactile what is made invisible, always sharpening the audience’s position as a witness, in what seems to be an alley without end.  

Haunted by different ghosts of enduring pasts, his work leaves us with a feeling of being stuck. Not only stuck in space, unable to flee the war, or stuck in time, carrying the weight to remember in our lingering desire to forget, but also stuck to one side of an image and its other. It confronts us with the powerlessness we can feel when daily scrolling on images of war and devastation on social media, overseeing the bigger picture, but also with the question how to relate to images dealing with the pain and death of others, without aestheticizing them.

Moving away from that question, scholar Ariella Aicha Azoulay proposes to get rid of the opposition of aesthetics and politics imposed by a professionalized gaze, that looks and judges the works of art at play. There indeed exists no image outside of the aesthetic plane. Politics can moreover never be reduced to a trait of the image itself. Azoulay then generously suggest to look at their reception, and approach images as spaces of appearance, where the possibility of public action resides. In the images rising out of the ruins of war and devastation in Images Mon Amour, an open encounter undeniably emerges, but an encounter not only between the different living beings animating the images at view, not only the object, subject and viewer of those mourning images, but also those that did not survive the captured catastrophe and devastation. That loving necro-political space of appearance, that endlessly renewed encounter then not only includes the living but also the often silenced witnesses of history, likewise always moving and making us move anew at any point in time, in unforeseen directions.

JBY: The venue of Extra City, the stunning but serene desecrated Dominican church close to the central Station in Antwerp, sheds an interesting light on your work. The architecture and history of the place accentuates the already very present and at times overwhelming feeling of mourning in your drawings and video’s. Even if it’s already desecrated for 20 years now, you feel it’s the right place to deal with images of devastation, death, decay and mourning so central in your work?

RM: Certainly, when you enter the exhibition you immediately feel the powerful presence of the Dominican church. But, a desecrated church is not an easy space to show you work in. It has already a strong identity in itself. The space itself carries a history and a strong identity. From the beginning I was challenged. How to deal with something as inevitably religious as a church. I come from Lebanon, a country marked by its civil wars, where religious differences play an important role in different conflicts and massacres between various confessional groups. As an atheist, I prefer not to deal with religion, I even have an aversion for everything religious. So, when, I first came here, I was like, really? Of course, my first immediate response was to attack the church, to make a proposition that would go against it. But then I decided it is better maybe not to. I worked on a proposition, that would just be with this particular space, without opposing it, without invading it with my work neither. I opened myself up to the venue as it is, without changing it, so it can host me as I am too. I did not want to change the church, nor the church to change me. The challenge was how to accept each other. The church is worn out, it has a lot cracks and fissures in the floor and on the walls, this decay also resonates with some of the themes I relate to in my work.

JBY: When we enter the church we are welcomed by the work “Again we are defeated” where projected drones hoover above sketches of silhouettes or shadows of death bodies on paper. In the confessional a bit further in the church, you also share with the audience how defeats, unlike victories do not accumulate. From one angle you show how defeat is always bodily, inescapably lived in the flesh through the finitude of our life, whereas on the other hand you render visible the lethal technological calculated gaze of the perpetrators.

RM: Even though there is something playful in the title, it almost speaks by itself. There is indeed something in its repetition. It is not the first time we are defeated, and it looks like it will not be the last time neither. In one of the 6 audio-works that I placed in the different confessional booths, I am not only sharing the insight that defeats do not accumulate like victories, but I also confess that I have never managed to be the first, nor have I ever succeed to be the last. But, I am and will always be late. Moreover, I will never manage to be in the middle. So, again we will try, even if we know that we will be defeated, we will try. We will be defeated, but we will try again and again. So with this title, I want the hope to never die.

The installation is using these two media together. So the video of the drones is projected over the drawings on the wall. There are about 112 drawings of different corpses. All 112 bodies are killed, someone actively put an end to their life. They did not die a natural death. In Lebanon, or Syria for that matter, there is no justice for most of the people killed, I can even say for all of the people killed.  It’s always “case closed”. Wiped away, hidden, and denied any acknowledgement. Nobody wants to talk about them. Authorities often want to hide the corpses, because they are complicit in the massacres and war crimes. But when they try to hide the killed bodies somewhere in the ground or in the sea, they always forget their shadow. I am trying to draw with my pencil this shadow that stays, as a trace kept by those whose life are taken. The projected drones are lethal killer drones, but with the size of flies. So the first impression I want to give from far when you enter the church, is the impression of a drone massacre. The drones are hoovering like flies over the massacred people.

The calculated gaze of the perpetrator relates to a question of representation. Peter Brooks, the theater maker, always asked this brilliant question. How many trees do you need to represent a forest on a stage? Three, ten, a hundred? You can simply choose to just write “forest” on a paper and the spectators will immediately imagine a forest. So the word will represent the forest. Then, when you want to represent a massacre or a war, the question is not how many elements you present, but how you present them.

Like in ‘As if seen by a bird standing on the top of a cow’ you make the visitor look up and in a way look back at the drones constantly watching over some of us.

RM: When drones film, they do so through the bird’s eye perspective. So imagine now that the bird is on the floor, or on the top of the cow if you like, and looks upward. In this installation I simply flip the gaze, which allows a shift from looking down, to looking up. In the same gesture, I also flip the imaginary of the land, so the sky comes down and the ground with its destroyed ruins rise up, above our heads. So the sky transforms into a ruin in a way.

JBY: After passing by the 112 drawings, we are invited in the exhibition space through a movement in perspective enabled by the way you installed your work. Slowly walking by the different images composing your ‘Diary of a leap year”, the drawings are leading us to two different videos shifting our perspective. In ‘The Other, the Unknown Other and Other Stories” and ‘Too Close Yet Inaccessible’, the viewer has to stand still and watch the images strolling by this time. The contrasting play with movement takes the viewers not only into the exhibition, but also into a movement of flight, seemingly fleeing along the devastation and war depicted in your drawings and collages.

RM: We always try to run away from our realities, dominated by conflicts, wars and violence. We try to escape, to run away, towards a better, more peaceful life. Unfortunately this fleeing is often in vain. We are running all the time, but remain stuck in the same place, in the very ruins, the rubble itself. Alas, you cannot run away from your reality. It’s impossible. So you imagine another life, the life that you would like to have. At times you can sense it close by, but it will always remain inaccessible, unconceivable, unattainable, and unreachable.  

Also for the collages in “Images Mon Amour” I show people always ready to leave, with their most treasured possessions in a luggage wrapped over their shoulder. They want to go, they want to leave but there is no way out. They are stuck in the ruins as all the means of transportation, like ships, planes, trains, are there, but broken so they cannot use them. We always try to run away from the things we should face. Maybe we simply should not run away, so we can try to face our reality to solve it. No, we are running away instead, hiding the things we want to forget.

JBY: But fleeing is also imagining a different possible outcome, a way out of the devastation and the endless war. Your implicit reference to Hiroshima points not only to this haunting prospect of complete annihilation, over different scales and geographies resulting in a global no place of sorts, but also to the complete destruction of any future perspectives. Your work seems to surpass the simple dichotomy between optimism and pessimism, by simultaneously confronting the limits of both. But I cannot but to mirror or reflect back the devastation, the loss of perspective in the images you show.

RM: You are maybe right, it is not about optimism or pessimism. When you enter the exhibition, there is something emotional, almost physically about the more abstract work that takes you at the beginning. But then little by little, the presented works create a little more distance. So they give you more space to think what all these images, drawings and sketches are about and the question they pose. These questions bring you slowly to the last room which is dedicated to the videos of my non-academic lectures. They really offer the audience material to think about and ask more concrete questions and issues. No, it’s not about optimism or pessimism, nor about conclusions and answers. My proposition is all about unfinished ideas, unfinished work also. I want to keep a form of incompleteness that still needs the spectator, needs the audience to add to it, because it is always a shared incompleteness.

You seem to defy us with the inescapability of an ever expanding war, stuck not only in space but also over time. In ‘The Other, the Unknown. Other and Other Stories’ you share with the fictional character of Corol, the impossibility to leave Beirut, even when visiting other cities, as you always seem to be haunted by ghosts of a past that you thought you had lost or forgotten.

RM: The feeling of being hunted and haunted. Indeed you run away from your place to actually find it back differently. And you run away from your city to find it in another city. You find your city in another city, you go to another city to discover your city. You go to another place to discover your past, to remember your past. And also, moreover, sometimes you go to another city to see the future of your city, even to see the past, present, and the future at the same time.

JBY: Installed in the high ceiling of the church, the video ‘Images mon Amour’ acquires almost a celestial reach. The slow version of Mozart’s requiem playing on a music box in the background, accentuates the deep scroll, showing in a long, ascending movement a thick collage of devastating images selected from your archive, made of newspaper clippings, digital photos and stills you collected.

RM: Indeed, the form of the installation is inspired by the way we use our smartphones, where we always scroll for news. We are drawn in an interminable stream of images, that seems too go on and on in a never ending movement. At some point, you put it away, because you’re tired of it, but the steam of images continues. It’s the same idea with ‘Images Mon Amour’. It has the form of a screen, and like the scroll, it goes on endlessly. It gives you the impression it goes on for forever. The images of violence, the violent images and the images of wars and catastrophes come and invade our eyes and our minds daily. We cannot run away from them. They are coming forever. So how can we digest these images, how can we deal with them, how can we continue our life while faced with this continuous stream of images. The presence of the geological layers, the sky and the sea show us the depth of the scroll, but also of history and its desolation. It’s not about 2006, nor is it about 2016 or 2020. It goes deep in our history as humans, already since thousands of years we are waging war after war.

JBY: In your non-academic lecture ‘On Three Posters’, you tackle the problem of translatability, as in the post 9/11 era you work was received differently depending on the context where it was shown. When seeing the installation ‘The Mediterranean Sea’, I directly thought how in 2011 people risked their life to reclaim their right to international mobility, the right to cross the Mediterranean. When you look at it from Palestine, Lebanon or Syria, instead of North-Africa, the dead body floating on the sea maybe has a different meaning?

RM: The sea keeps a lot of secrets. It swallows a lot of people too. Indeed the video installation is not only related to the movement of refugees now. Especially today, from Lebanon and Syria, people risk their lives by boats. They are drained and killed by the sea. The sea gulped them, took their souls. But also before, during the civil war in Lebanon from 1975 till 1990, the corpses of the committed massacres, were thrown into the sea. So the sea transforms into a sort of symmetry of mass graves. We have about 17,000 persons missing until today. Maybe they are somewhere on the bottom of the sea? Are they really still missing? We don’t know where they are. The corpses did not appear until today. Moreover, nobody from those responsible, who are still in power today by the way, take any responsibility. They won’t tell us what they have done to those missing. The sea hides something really violent inside. At the same time, the sea always holds a semblance of a promise, the promise to take you to somewhere else. Like a horizon. So if you can safely cross the sea, you cross the line of the horizon, and you will probably have a new life after. But too many people did not make it.

JBY: At the same times the waves of the sea give and impression of cleansing, washing away whatever that needs to be washed away, as a form of purification. It endlessly washes away our crimes too, like the church washes way our sins maybe?

RM: This is what the church supposedly does, yes. Like in Islam, when you do the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, you also wash away your sins. To me, it is a senseless idea, very similar to confession.  At any time, whenever you think it’s the right moment, you would be able to wash and purify yourself, to start your life anew. You can turn a new blank page whenever you feel like. This is also exactly what happened in Lebanon, when they decided to stop the fighting, to stop the civil war, they also turned the page, and decided not to investigate the reasons of the atrocities, not to open investigation files or start juridical cases. They had the feeling it was enough, so they turned the page as if nothing happened. So they were no criminals, no perpetrators judged, we were suddenly all pure and innocent again. So we start anew from the beginning, just because we decided so. What is this hypocrisy? What is this lie? As long as we keep on turning the page, we are perpetuating war, which keeps on continuing, war after war, like nothing changed. It’s very similar as going to the church convinced God will forgive you for your crimes, and you come back and go on with your life happily, but it’s not true, it’s more complicated.

JBY: It reminds me of your installation ‘Eye versus Eye’, the double shot. Where you engage into an almost forensic investigation to render the face of a perpetrator visible to hold him accountable, for his sin of protecting the Assad regime during the Syrian war. Through this endless spiral, going from the image of the eye the victim filming and the eye of the culprit shooting, you humanize the victim, and simultaneously unmask the perpetrator. Like most of your work on show, the endless loop holds the viewer in suspension, waiting for the shot to happen. But like in a cowboy duel in a Western, you know the shot will come.

RM: Yes, I call it the in-between state. In that twilight state there’s something happening in our relation to place and time that is fundamentally different than the relation we experience in our daily life. So it’s these moments where your experience the elasticity of time, when minutes could be hours, could be days or even years. During this moment of eye contact between the killer and the victim, time and space shift to another logic. Nothing will cut the spiral, and bring it back to the world of the living, except the bullet, the shot, like the cut. Without the cut, it will remain an endless loop. So they are stuck. For us, it’s suspended. But for the one who is in this moment, filming the one who will shoot him, he or she will be in a different space, in a different time, in a different logic.

JBY: Indeed, they keep on filming, even though they know it will probably end there for them. But hopefully they survived the shot, like you said in you non-academic lecture ‘The pixelated Revolution’, because someone had to upload the video in the end.

RM: What is intriguing is that the victim is always off screen, it is only the movement of the camera and the sound that we understand the sniper shot him. So, we never see the corpse, we don’t know what really happened to the protester. Did he die, injured, managed to escape? The only thing that we know for sure is that his video has been saved. We have seen it uploaded on the Internet.  But still in the video, we don’t see the face of the victim, we don’t see any blood. There is nothing. When we try to imagine what might have happened to the protestor when he was shot, it becomes almost unbearable. The violence is in our mind.  My question then is how can we bring the victim as a witness in the image, how can we imagine the witness that is being shot, not in a Hollywood way with a simple shot/countershot, but in the shot itself? Since there is an eye contact between both, the only way out is to blow up the eye of the perpetrator, to see the reflection of the victim in his eye. Victims have the image of their killers left in the eye. This is one way to bring all the victims into the image.

JBY: Where as in the overall show ‘Images Mon Amour’ a fatalistic sentiment seems to prevail, in ‘I Swear with Fire and Iron’ we can feel a sense resistance. While watching a hand struggling, being forced into and released from what seems to be a torture or at least a disciplining instrument, we listen to two different versions of the same communist refrain, both song by your brother Yasser, before and after he was hit by a bullet during the civil war. The effortlessness your brother sings the song, speaks as much to the fixity, reproducibility and disciplinary effect of the communist song as to your brother his resilience despite the unfortunate communication disorder he got after being shot during the civil war. It might be contradictory, as singing this song will not stop the war, but I found hope and the possibility of repair and resistance in this work.

RM: The question is really how this ideological narrative enters into people’s minds. When a child sings a revolutionary song, he embodies a very violent narrative by singing the will to fight until the very end. That little boys sings that if he loses his hand, he will fight with the other one, and if he loses both, he will use his teeth. He’s just singing it as a normal song. If someone knows Arabic, she/he will notice there are a lot of words the boy is mispronouncing, so you understand he doesn’t fully grasps the meaning of the lyrics. After he got shot during the civil war and indeed became aphasic, another difficulty with language emerge. When singing the same communist song, he loses some letters, and mispronounces other words. So now, it’s the opposite, he knows what the song means, but he cannot sing it correctly anymore. When listening to him sing, we see his hand, which is now taking another form, another position, constantly being correct. Training, almost disciplining his hand with this wooden medical tool, forcing him to open it and put all five fingers in the right order, straight and open. But will it allow his hand to move like before?