Rabih Mroue's 'The Pixelated Revolution' at Dharamshala International Film Festival

Rabih Mroué’s multipart project The Pixelated Revolution, 2012, explores the role of social media, texting and mobile phone cameras in informing and mobilizing people during the current Syrian revolution. Mroué investigates this newly emerged form of ‘immediate documentary’ produced by persons directly involved in regions of active and acute violence due to a shortage of professional journalists. Mroué juxtaposes the immediacy of shocking, live footage downloaded off the internet originating from cell phones held by citizen journalists often being shot at and killed themselves, or in the artist’s words “filming their own death”, with succinct quotes about the ‘rules’ of pure film loosely based on Dogma 95, the cinematographic manifesto of Danish filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Mroué thereby draws parallels to the advice and precise instructions regarding the taking of photographs and their dissemination via the medium of Facebook and other virtual communication tools for protesters.

Mroué examines various aspects of this new form of photographic documentation asking whether mobile phones of Syrian protesters become an extension of their bodies or whether the familiar look of the phone display or camera lens may convey a false sense of immunity. Mroué further considers in what manner we can envisage the photographic traces broadcast by Syrians in the vast, ever changing universe of the Internet, framed by incomplete downloads, pixelated images, and ruptured modes of communication. In addition, the artist calls into question his own as well as the viewer’s ‘outside’ position, making and viewing art in studios and institutions rather than joining protesters on the streets, stating “One of the things we always say is that art needs distance, and that art needs a kind of peace. But at the same time, with the revolution in Tunisia, or the revolution in Egypt, or the violence in Syria, when are we allowed to talk about it? How long do we have to wait before we can make a work? I think there are no limits, no defined times.”