Liberation or emancipation? Counter-hegemony,performance and public space in Lebanon

Abstract

This article is about the ways in which counter-hegemony is expressed in performance art dealing with notions of public space and the publics. The article examines two works of art from Lebanon: Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh’s Photo-Romance (2009), produced and performed before the initial heady days of the Arab uprisings of 2011 unravelled, and the Dictaphone Group’s This Sea is Mine (2012), produced immediately after the onset of the uprisings. Each of the pieces interrogates public space and citizenship in Beirut in very different ways to express dissent and perform resistance. The former does so through a conceptual interrogation of public space in Beirut within an institutional set-up, and the insistence on the inability to ever represent the country’s contentious sectarian politics. The latter works through an embodied experience focusing on interaction with the public physically located outside of an art institutional set-up and literally along the city’s shoreline. By drawing on theories of aesthetics and their relationship to radical democracy in public space, the article highlights the different iterations of counter-hegemony that circulate in the work of these contemporary Arab artists to argue that, like the momentous Arab uprisings of 2011–12, resistant works of art may only be understood within a longer history of strife and popular protest in the region that have produced differing forms of dissent at various points in time.