ABSTRACT
This interview with Lebanese performance artist Mroué focuses on his theatre works and his non-academic lectures – Pixelated Revolution (2011), Riding on a Cloud (2013), and Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane (2020); and on his gallery installations – Again we are defeated (2018) and Swept Under the Carpet (2022), to interrogate the realities of making art in the present-day Middle East. Mroué discusses how mediatised images of violence and of history need to be critiqued in order for them not to participate in the processes of aestheticising reality. He asks if it is possible to envision aesthetic practices of resistance, which cannot be commodified by the power regimes.
