The Pixelated Revolution

The text foregrounds the relationship between three main elements: gaze, image and violence. Framed by the theoretical propositions in the selected texts by Marie-José Mondzain and Jean-Luc Nancy, this relationship is considered in the context of the current socio-political realities in the Middle East (Syria) but also in the broader, global sense. I take contemporary visual practice as my starting point and consider “The Pixelated Revolution” (the project by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué) as exemplary in this context in order to engage with the following phenomenon - recording one’s own death in the revolutionary and wartime conditions, at a level that connects several key elements of the debate: the visual character of mobile (phone) technology, image-producing operations, the concept of self-sacrifice, and the mobilization of communities towards radical transformations. The purpose of this text is to encourage future reflections about the role images perform nowadays (in particular those created under the conditions of lethal threat and violence) and about the implications of an external observer in this process, when looking at such images in the exhibition context from a ‘lateral’ (i.e., supposedly safe and neutral) perspective.