International Institute of Political Murder
A sociology teacher after having been Pierre Bourdieu's student in Paris, essayist, critic, cinema director and stage director, Milo Rau intertwines all his skills to “make major historical events accessible to spectators”. Whether he decides to evoke The Last Hours of the Ceausescus (2009), the Norwegian massacre on Utoya island (Breivik's Declaration, 2012) or, most recently, the conviction of the Russian feminists Pussy Riot (The Moscow Trial, 2013), this young Swiss artist always works in a rigorous way. With the members of the International Institute of Political Crime that he founded in 2007 between Berlin and Zurich, he plunges into painstaking research for each of his projects, multiplying encounters with witnesses from the period, consulting all the archives available on the subject to present aesthetically worked-out reconstitutions of them. By going beyond the boundaries between the different artistic media, blending history, art and politics, Milo Rau composes a theatre of the real that favours reflection on indoctrination, exacting pedagogy on superficial and simplified information.
JFP, April 2013.