The Pixelated Revolution: Non-Academic Lecture

Rabih Mroué's work takes the form of a non-academic video lecture. The artist asks questions about the use of contemporary devices in documenting events. He bases his discussion on events that took place in 2011 in connection with the so-called Syrian revolution, referring to material that civilians recorded on mobile phones and later published on the internet in order to report on what was happening in their country. Filmed by shaking hands, these blurry clips document a phenomenon that Mroué calls "double shooting": In a video uploaded to YouTube a gunman aims his weapon at a protester while a civilian aims his cellphone camera at the gunman; the camera falls, shots are heard, and we don't know if the civilian has been killed. The clip is such low resolution that when we zoom in the gunman's face is nothing but an arrangement of pixels, but the face of a killer has been captured in the viewfinder. Mroué's work was one of two ex aequo winners of the main WRO 2013 award. The WRO 2015 Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland, opens today. You're invited!