- 04.05.2016, 7 p.m.free of charge
Religious provisions make it impossible to have a corpse cremated in Lebanon. In Appendix, Lina Majdalanie describes her radical decision to sidestep the law and nevertheless have her body abandoned to fire: she plans to have all her organs removed bit by bit and the limbs amputated and sold as art objects. The degree to which the performer methodically pursues these thoughts and in doing so focuses on the degree of violence, which religion and the state exert on the bodies of individuals, is fascinating and shocking. As in her many collaborations with Rabih Mroué, Majdalani’s performance blurs the boundaries between personal life, art and politics. Appendix is also Lina Majdalanie’s inaugural lecture to mark the beginning of her Friedrich Hölderlin Guest Professorship at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
In French with German and English surtitles.
Concept, Text, Performance: Lina Majdalanie.
Biography
Lina Majdalanie
Lina Majdalanie was born in Beirut (Lebanon) and works as an actor as well as a director and writer. She has devised numerous productions including ‘Biokhraphia’ (2002), ‘Photoromance’ (2009), ‘33 rpm and a few seconds’ (2012), ‘A Drop of Sweat’ (2015), ‘Appendice’ (2016), ‘Do I Know you?’ (2017), ‘Borborygmus’ (2019) and ‘Last but not Last’ (2020). She has also taught at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design in Geneva, DasArts in Amsterdam, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and Bard College, Berlin. In her work Majdalanie investigates forms of political language in and age of globalisation and digital technology. She regularly curates programmes for a range of institutions such as ‘Motion-Less’ (Tanzquartier Wien, 2009), ‘Beyond Beirut’ (Künstlerhaus Mousonturm 2016) and ‘Relatively Universal’ (HAU, 2017).