To Image and to Imagine: Walid Raad, Rabih Mroué, and the Arab Spring

From the "I" to the "We"

In 2010, contemporary arts museum BAK in Utrecht, the Netherlands, curated Rabih Mroué's first solo exhibition, referencing the achievement of a theatre artist breaking into the fine art circuit with the exhibit's playful title wavering between self-celebratory and self-effacing: I, the Undersigned. A few months into the exhibit, Mroué crossed out with a bold red line the big lettered title displayed on the pristine white gallery wall and graffitied in cursive Arab lettering underneath: "The People Are Demanding." The slogan had just begun circulating among demonstrating crowds first in Tunisia and then in Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt, in a wave of protests that soon came to be named in the media as the Arab Spring. With a single gesture, Mroué drew a line underneath his previous work and hinted at beginning a new chapter. The move from the "I" to the "we" underscored an intent to recalibrate forms and temporalities in a shifted focus from past memories to future aspirations—from an obsession with parsing and (de)ciphering a long history of civil war in Lebanon and marking the present with the signs of trauma to a collective effort to move beyond ghosts and traces to imagine what can happen in an approaching future.

In the same year, Walid Raad, another Lebanese artist who also challenges disciplinary boundaries made similar surveying gestures upon a body of work that seemed to have reached completion. Unlike his Atlas Group work, which focused primarily on the Lebanese wars of 1975 to 1991, Raad's current ongoing project, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow (which he initiated in 2007) finds Raad shifting his gaze forward, attempting to open "'communication' with the artists of the future" who might emerge out of the "rich yet thorny ground" shaped by conflicts like the Lebanese wars.¹ "Over the past few years, I have been fascinated by the emergence of new art museums, galleries, schools and cultural foundations in cities such as Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Istanbul, Ramallah and Sharjah, among others," writes Raad as an introduction on the project website.² For Raad, part of this "communication" with the future involves reopening the lines of transmission between the past and the present, while recognizing that the lines are garbled with the "noise" that accompanies the "telepathic signals" heard across great expanses of time.³ To this end, in 2010, Raad began Index XXVI: Artists, a subset project that collects and catalogs information on past Lebanese artists and invites audiences to correct the mistakes in the information on display, which Raad claims he received "by way of telepathy and/ or thought insertion and/or using a future technology."⁴ In playful, quasi-mystical language, Raad recounts how renowned dancers and local cooks corrected these mistakes with colorful spray-paint, only to reveal the intention of the future artists to "[distort] the names they communicated to me directly" in order to gain access to the colors of the spray-paint used for the corrections, which were unavailable to them in the future.⁵ Like the larger project of which it is a part, Index XXVI projects history into a present in development that is moving toward a discernible future, crossing the line from the "I" to the "we" of a collective authorship that includes even the voices of the future.

The wave of popular uprisings in the Arab world that rippled out from Tunisia in 2010 shifted the focus of Mroué's and Raad's art toward a future they attempted to augur through the smoke and rubble of increasingly violent, protracted conflicts. "It was clear that I couldn't continue participating in exhibitions as if nothing was happening, and so the changes became somehow inevitable," Mroué wrote of his initial reaction to the revolutions. "The first thing that struck me was the rallying call from the Arab Spring, 'The People are Demanding.' … It is 'we' who are demanding—as Lebanese, as Arabs, or as unnamed 'people,' if you want."⁶ The cry of...