Rabih Mroué (LB/DE)

A poster at the Salzburg Kunstverein warns of an air raid. A passer-by alerts the police, who assumes that there is an acute threat and begins to evacuate the building. But the poster actually belongs to an exhibition by the media and performance artist Rabih Mroué. It is a reproduction of a leaflet dropped by the U.S. Army over Iraq to announce imminent bombings – a practice as common as it is cynical to warn of airstrikes. In his Non-Academic Lecture “Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane”, Rabih Mroué takes the events in Salzburg as an opportunity to raise questions about the relationship between art and the public. How can an artistic object become an object of threat?

Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué works at the intersection of theatre, performance and visual art. He masterfully combines aesthetic questions with social and political realities, using video, photographs and historical documents to examine how images and stories are constructed and instrumentalized – and how this blurs the line between fiction and reality.

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