Curator: Aurora Fernández Polanco

CA2M holds Rabih Mroué´s first solo exhibition in Spain. Mroué (b. 1967, Lebanon) developed his career as director, playwright, performer, musician and visual artist, his work always reflects on the use of images in (and against) official narratives: from the Lebanese geopolitical reality to the massive production of videos of the Syrian revolution.

Throughout specific experiences marking his biography (specifically Lebanon’s war and post-war, alongside the Israeli occupation) the works carried out by Mroué with his personal file raise questions that, among our own life experiences together with news from the media, concerns all of us; issues that have to do with truth, fiction, memory, forgetfulness, disappearance, and mechanisms that rule representation tricks or that, as it is now happening, establish new and powerful relationships between those images and ourselves. Thus, what Mroué called “the pixelated revolution” shows how images resist to be questioned as representation: They become externals, contiguous to the body, their raison d´être is placed on the exchanging and mobility, images that act.

Mroué’s art production dilemma (with images) focuses on the relation between “I” and “we,” mass and person. In March 2011, Rabih Mroué decides to change the title of his INIVA solo show in London: I, the Undersigned for I, the Undersigned. The People are demanding, after the outbreak of what is known as Arab Spring, with riots in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman and Syria; and the taking over of Athens, London and Madrid’s Squares. The “I” is put aside to give rise to “We”; the verb used in London—”are”—pointed out the importance of the people no longer as a compact and singular entity, like captured in many of the master narratives from the 20th century.

The bilingual Spanish-English exhibition catalogue includes Rabih Mroué’s anthology and texts by Bilal Khbeiz, Aurora Fernández Polanco, Lina Saneh and Pablo Martínez.