A Note on the Index in Contemporary Documentary Theatre

Abstract

This essay investigates the status of the index in contemporary performative documentary practices, which draw upon and include found visual records and documents on war and conflict. Specifically, the essay discusses the notion of the index and its concomitant notion of evidence within the context of a global visual culture, where the use of digital images claiming to truthfully represent war and conflict has become an increasingly important part of warfare. Focusing on the performance lecture The Pixelated Revolution by performance artist, actor, and director Rabih Mroué, the essay argues that rather than focusing solely on the ostensible evidentiary character of the images in question, contemporary artistic practices guide our attention towards the epistemological frames through which these images are perceived. Specifically, they invite us to take into consideration the various systems of knowledge and meaning making through which information, or evidence if you will, is produced and processed. This strategy of exploring and disclosing epistemological frames and their concomitant logics could be viewed as a way, the article contends, of unsettling both the forms of knowledge systems and the underlying power structures to which we more or less unwittingly conform when engaging with mediated accounts of war and conflict. Indeed, by inserting images of war and conflict circulating across various media platforms into the discursively bounded space of performance, such works invite audiences to form a temporary public space in which to collectively contemplate and perhaps even re-imagine the epistemological frames that shape how these images are perceived. In this way, the article concludes, the space of performance may therefore offer a welcome space for engaging with the question of documentary images’ indexicality and necessarily troubled relation to reality.