The Crocodile Who Ate the Sun, 2015
Series of 12 photographs, printed flyer, handwritten text
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2025
Rabih Mroué is one of the most significant figures of the contemporary Lebanese cultural diaspora, having developed a multifaceted body of work that spans theatre, the visual arts, and writing. His practice explores memory and narration, particularly in relation to traumatic historical events such as the Lebanese Civil War, and broader geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East. Through staged dialogues, personal testimonies, and archival references, he challenges the concept of truth and examines how historical memory is constructed. The work revisits the summer of 1982 through a reflective lens. At that time, the then fifteen-year-old artist witnessed the Israeli army dropping hundreds of thousands of leaflets over Beirut during the Lebanon War. These leaflets, which provided instructions to civilians, simultaneously served as tools of intimidation and psychological manipulation. Three decades later, Mroué reproduced one of these leaflets and subjected it to collective handling. He distributed copies to friends and colleagues, inviting them to touch, handle, and engage with them freely while recounting their own memories. He then photographed the weathered documents: torn, crumpled, stained, or folded, they bear the traces of touch and remembrance.
These photographs serve as keepsakes of trauma and traces of a collective experience. The work focuses on the violence inscribed within the material remnants of history. As a contemporary memento mori, it does not merely evoke mortality but also sheds light on contemporary “necropolitics”, where power determines who is granted the right to live and who is rendered expendable and forgotten. The artwork’s title refers to a children’s fairy tale in which a crocodile swallows the sun, plunging the world into darkness. Although the sun eventually returns and order is restored, distrust remains: the animals continue to hate all crocodiles, showing how a single event can generate lasting collective prejudices.
Rabih Mroué was born in 1967 in Beirut. He lives and works in Berlin.
