The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is honored to be hosting Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, internationally acclaimed Lebanese theater & visual artists, in conjunction with their performance-lectures at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Mroué and Saneh will be performing at the MCA on April 10-12, and then will be at The University of Chicago for a performance & discussion on April 14.

Born 1967 in Beirut, Rabih Mroué is a crucial voice in contemporary performance. With his collaborator Lina Saneh, Mroué creates semi-documentary works that address social and political problems and investigate the nature of information and the archive. Often  rooted in the interplay between private & public personas, erased & expanded memory, and truth & fiction, his works have been featured in theaters, festivals, and exhibitions throughout the Middle East and Europe, including dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany.

PERFORMANCE: 33 rpm and a few seconds

Thursday-Saturday April 10-12, 7:30p / Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.  For more info, please visit MCA Chicago.  $10 student tickets (limited quantity). 

PERFORMANCE & DISCUSSION w/ Rabih Mroué & Lina Saneh

Monday April 14, 12-1:30p / Gray Center Lab, 929 E. 60th St., Chicago, co-hosted by the Open Practice Committee.  RSVP: Leslie Danzig, Gray Center Curator.  (Please note that this event will begin with a short performance at noon; your prompt arrival and rsvp are appreciated.)  Lunch will be served.

FOR UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FACULTY

For U of C faculty interested in engaging in informal conversations, exploring topics of mutual interest, with an eye towards possibly developing a collaborative project at the the Gray Center under the auspices of the Mellon Residential Fellowship Program for Arts Practice & Scholarship, please contact  Leslie Danzig, Gray Center Curator.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

With his “lecture performances” Rabih Mroué has cultivated a form of theater that dates back to the tradition of the storyteller in the Arab markets. Mroué’s point of departure is often an everyday discovery that he reworks into surprising contexts. Photographs, videos, and newspaper clippings serve as the source material for decoding meanings that may be hidden in official announcements. His performances, although scripted, are designed to appear more like improvised works in progress, reflecting his continuing theme of inquiry that deemphasizes spectacle in favor of provoking thought and searching for new relationships between actors and audiences. Read Laura Allsop’s CNN piece: Rabih Mroue, the Lebanese artist starting a creative rebellion.

Lina Saneh is a theater maker who collaborates with Rabih Mroué, and writes and directs her own works of theater and video. In her earlier works, Saneh focused on physical theater as a way of addressing how our bodies are imprinted by sociopolitical conflicts and contradictions in the Middle East. Her current multimedia artworks, performing arts, and video works interrogate the status of our citizenship and our position in public spaces, and raise the possibility of creating a new political liberation. She is an assistant professor at the Institut d’études scéniques, audio-visuelles et cinématographiques at Université Saint-Joseph, Beirut and at Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik, Lebanon. Read more about Lina Saneh.