The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution. The lecture looks at the central role that the photographs taken with these devices played in informing and mobilizing people during the revolutionary events, due to their ability to be shared and spread through virtual and viral communication platforms.
Rabih Mroué is an actor, director, playwright and visual artist as well as contributing editor for The Drama Review (TDR) and the quarterly Kalamon. Employing both fiction and in-depth analysis as tools for engaging with his immediate reality, Mroué explores the responsibilities of the artist in communicating with an audience in given political and cultural contexts. His works deal with issues that have been swept under the rug in the current political climate of Lebanon, connected to the enduring marks left by the Lebanese Civil War as well as more recent political events.
“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls...
“In the 1980s I started using coloured paper backdrops, one of which was yellow...
Anti-Happening refers to Koller’s 1965 manifesto, ‘Anti-Happening (System of Subjective Objectivity)’...
“Other photographers used to send me negatives of cross-eyed people, asking me to retouch them...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
“When you position your hand on someone’s shoulder, your shoulders become straight and horizontal...
“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls...
“The two men were relatives and both were in the Lebanese Army.” Hashem El Madani...
“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself...
This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection)...