Diary of a Leap Year

Rabih Mroué's Diary of a Leap Year is a year of newspaper cutouts, one collage for each of the 366 days, made as a personal record of violence in Lebanon and the wider Arab world.

Mroué cut the material from local Lebanese newspapers and some international ones, and treats the daily collage as another way of writing about acts of violence. The book reproduces all 366 in colour across 720 pages, in English and Arabic. It is softcover with a cloth binding and a dust jacket, and measures 20 × 13.5 cm. Kaph Books published it in 2017 on the occasion of Mroué's exhibition Between Two Battles at Kunsthalle Mainz (11 November 2016 to 26 February 2017).

Mroué was born in Beirut in 1967. He is a theatre director, actor, playwright and visual artist. His work includes video and installation, sometimes with photography, text and sculpture, and comes out of theatre. He has said of it: "My works deal with issues that have been swept under the table in the current political climate of Lebanon."