A poster at the Kunstverein in Salzburg warns of an air raid. A passer-by sees it and calls the police. They view it as an immediate threat and start to evacuate the building. But the poster is actually part of an exhibition by the media and performance artist Rabih Mroué. It reproduces a leaflet dropped over Iraq by the US Army to give notice of immanent bombing – a practice as common as it is cynical, of providing a warning before an air raid.
In Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane Rabih Mroué uses the events in Salzburg as an example to raise questions about the relationship between art and public life. How can an art object be turned into an object of threat? He masterfully combines aesthetic questions with social and political realities and investigates how images and stories can be constructed and instrumentalised as fiction and reality merge.
Rabih Mroué’s non-academic lectures subvert the conventional format of a lecture through the lens of performance, shifting from presentation to representation, from reality to imagination, and deliberately blurring the nature of the discourse he brings to the stage — at once authoritative and objective.
Before Falling Seek the Assistance of Your Cane is part of Rabih Mroué’s Non-academic lectures series, which also includes Make me stop smoking, presented at Short Theatre 2025 on September 11.
Mroué also performs in A little bit of the moon, alongside Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, on September 8 and 9.
Rabih Mroué born in Beirut and lives in Berlin, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. Rooted in theatre, his work includes videos and installation art. In 1990 he began putting on his own plays, performances, and videos. Continuously searching for an alternative and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of the theatre art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theatre and its relationship with the other art-mediums and performing practiced. He is a contributing editor for The Drama Review /TDR (New York). He is also a co-founder and a board member of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/ FU/Berlin since 2013-2014. He has been working as theatre director at Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich) from 2015 to 2019.He has performed and exhibited internationally including dOCUMENTA (13) – Kassel, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – Madrid, The ICP Triennial and MoMa – New York , Centre Pompidou – Paris, SALT – Istanbul, among others…
produced by Rabih Mroué
ph. Christian Schuller