How Close Could We Get to the Light and Survive?

Curated by Rabih Mroué

Akram Zaatari, In This House, 2005 (film still)

In Lebanon, a country subject to upheaval since its inception, only one thing has remained stable: the continuous inter-penetrability of politics and religion, Rabih Mroué asserts. After the end of the Civil War in 1990, a new generation of artists felt the need to unpack history beyond its emptied propagandistic and political takeover. This allowed the rise of a format today widely known as “lecture performance.” With a series of “non-academic lectures,” Rabih Mroué invites Lebanese artists and writers to reflect upon today’s ongoing eruptions of violence in the region in light of a heavy historical legacy. By using this term, the program highlights its origin from an academic context, yet deploys the format as a strategy of artistic research to question the very authority of institutional restrictions and to investigate the fabrication of truth.

With Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hoda Barakat, Ahmad Beydoun, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lina Majdalanie, Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad, Mounira Al Solh, Akram Zaatari