PuSh 2014: The Pixelated Revolution

Rabih Mroué, who brought his Looking for a Missing Employee to the 2012 PuSh Festival, is back this year with The Pixelated Revolution, on at SFU Woodward's Studio T through this Saturday. Like the earlier work, this new piece is a lecture-performance; Mroué sits at a table downstage right, a MacBook to his right, a small desk lamp illuminating a sheaf of pages. As Mroué reads from this text, he projects images from the laptop onto the upstage wall. But whereas in Looking the artist told the story of the disappearance of a low-level functionary in the Lebanese government bureaucracy (and his possible ties to an emerging financial scandal) by stitching together his traces in print media, this time around Mroué is concerned with digital images, examining a series of cell-phone videos from the Syrian revolution uploaded to the Internet since 2011.

Mroué's central thesis is that the gun and the cell-phone camera--as prosthetic extensions of the person wielding each--are species of the same technology, and therefore locked in an endless battle in which neither can stop shooting. He illustrates this, most harrowingly, through two video sequences in which we witness two individuals filming with cell-phone cameras capturing themselves being fired upon--once by a rifle, and once by a tank. Mroué makes a persuasive case for why, in both instances, the filmers don't turn away: in the same way that the screen in the theatre auditorium mediates our experience of what we are watching (reassuring us, for example, that the bullets won't fly through it and at us), so does the cell-phone camera, held at a distance from the eye, function as a similar kind of screen for the person holding it. As an only mildly reassuring corollary to this, Mroué also suggests that just as in this "double shooting" the cell-phone videographer can't stop watching, the fact that we are now watching this watching means that he or she has survived--otherwise the footage would not have found its way onto the Internet.

This is just one of many stunning claims the artist makes in the course of the 60-minute show, including a breathtaking reading of the tripod--adjunct to a network's seamless image and a sniper's bullet arc--as the symbol of state stability and government orthodoxy. But if, as Mroué somberly concludes at the end of his piece, the shaky, fuzzy hand-held images collected via cell phones throughout the Arab Spring have not proven enough to secure the people's revolution, just like the thousands of tiny pixels that comprise each frame, together they accumulate to provide a record of the attempt--and, ideally, an incitement (on everyone's part) not to betray that attempt.

Accompanying Mroué's show is an exhibition called Nothing to Lose at the grunt gallery, on through February 8. Together with Tim Etchells, he is also one of two featured artists-in-residence at this year's Festival, and will be giving several workshops and talks (including as part of the PuSh Assembly) over the next two weeks. Full details at pushfestival.ca.

P.

PuSh 2012 Review #6: Looking for a Missing Employee at the Roundhouse

On September 25, 1996, a low-level bureaucrat in Lebanon's Ministry of Finance disappeared. Shortly thereafter there appeared a small item in one of Beirut's daily newspapers announcing this fact, and tying the disappearance to the loss of several billion Lebanese pounds from the coffers of the Ministry. A few days later the disappeared man's wife published an item denouncing the slander against her husband and appealing for information concerning his whereabouts. And so things continued for the next four months, with different newspapers tracking the story: quoting government sources and the disappeared man's family in equal measure; regularly reporting on the fluctuating amount of money stolen; implicating other individuals; linking the whole affair to a coincident scandal involving fraudulent stamps; and gradually revealing the depths of corruption within several other ministries.

Following every twist and turn in the story was Lebanese performance artist Rabih Mroué, who clipped related items from three different newspapers and pasted them into notebooks. Mroué has brought these notebooks with him to the PuSh Festival (in a performance co-presented with the Grunt and Contemporary Art Galleries), and out of this textual archive he weaves a Kafkaesque tale (and, yes, there is at one point a reference to a Josef K.) of deception, innuendo, and rumour that is as intriguing for how it is presented as for what it says. Indeed, because Mroué reconstructs the story of the missing employee entirely from published newspaper accounts that are two decades old, and for an international audience that would in large part be significantly removed--not just temporally and geographically, but also culturally and politically--from their import, drama and suspense must be created via their re-presentation and remediation. To that end, the notebooks of clipped and pasted newspaper articles are projected onto a screen via an overhead camera, with Mroué flipping through them and summarizing their content in largely chronological order, occasionally offering a comic aside or barbed comment on the contradictions contained within them, but for the most part literally letting them speak for themselves.

Except, of course, that it is Mroué doing the speaking, acting as our medium by translating the accounts from Arabic into English, and by helping to place the specifics of the missing employee's story in the larger political and cultural context not just of Lebanon, but of the entire Middle East region (the various reports of the employee having absconded to either Egypt or Syria or the no-man's land between Lebanon and Israel offer an occasion for Mroué to make oblique references to both present and past conflicts). Moreover, the spectral quality of Mroué's second-hand reportage is further enhanced by the fact that he does not sit, à la Spalding Gray (with whom he has justly been compared), at the empty table and chair positioned centre stage to tell us his tale, but rather among us in the audience, with his image then projected onto a small screen just behind the chair. It's an eerie and uncanny effect: Mroué is at once materially among us, re-discovering and in effect co-creating the story of the missing employee with us; at the same time, he is electronically and digitally removed from us, a virtual Big Brother governing how we receive the story. And, in this regard, the careful spectator starts to observe how Mroué at various moments chooses to edit the newspapers' own editing of the story, saying he is at loss for how to translate some of the Arabic phrasings, deciding not to convey the content of some of the articles at all, going back and forth between different newspapers at strategic moments, and censoring some of the accompanying photographs from our view.

How, in the end, can we know what is true and what is a lie? This is in fact the question put to us at the start of the show by Ghassan Halawani, the visual artist who is Mroué's performance collaborator. Like Mroué, Halawani sits among us in the audience, but with blank sheets of bristol board in front of him, and upon which he first writes a couple of epigraphs (including the one about truth and lies being only a hair's breadth apart) and then attempts to construct the timeline and order the facts of the missing employee's story. By the end of Mroué's spoken account of that story, Halawani's visual record is a mess of scratched out names, competing figures, and cancelled possibilities, its inadequacy as a final explanation for what happened underscored (or overwritten?) by the water that Halawani squirts upon the board at the end, blurring the different colour-coded jottings into a hopeless jumble.

As for Mroué, after he finishes recounting the missing employee's story, he continues to stare at us from the small centre-stage screen--even after the house lights come up, even after he receives a smattering of applause, even as the audience gets up to leave. It's a challenge that makes us uncomfortable, maybe because it implicates us in the double violence done to the employee (real and textual), maybe because it refuses us the closure promised by the last of the recited newspaper items. As Mroué's witty, complex, and ultimately chilling piece shows, there is always more than one story to be told.

Looking for a Missing Employee continues at the Roundhouse through this Saturday; a talkback with the artist moderated by Vanessa Kwan follows this evening's performance.

P.