Second Look / Paranoia TV

It is the hallmark of Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie's artistic work that they always mix documents and fiction. They charge contemporary historical sources with fictional narratives until history and fiction can no longer be distinguished from one another or they strip away everyday myths layer by layer until they are only visible as disconnected individual parts.

While their current show ‘Four Walls and a Roof’ uses Bertolt Brecht's exile in the USA as the starting point for a reflection on current experiences of flight, the video installation ‘Second Look’ shows images from their personal photo archive, which serve as triggers for a reinterpretation of experiences.

An experience everyone is familiar with: As you look at your photo collection, you might allow memories to return, and you might try to utter them, mixing your stories with their imagined ones. In brief, you might use them to talk about “you”; you, as an inseparable singular from all the other singulars, you, as an unbreakable moment from history.

Title of the episodes:

1. This Is Not a Metaphor
2. That Time When We Were Not Born
3. Since I Am a Bit Hypocrite
4. I Looked at The Photo, It Was Looking at Me with Watery Eyes
5. A Ghost Sitting on a Coach
6. Betreten Verboten
7. The Same Awe
8. Costantine Store
9. My Fears My Mistakes
10. S like Sadness, S like shit

Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst 2020


In addition to two video-works by Rabih Mroué:

• Letter to my sister
• Oriental plague

Commissioned and produced by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin 2021