work with tania el khoury
Cultural Exchange Rate is an interactive live art project in which artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria. One marked by war survival, valueless currency collection, brief migration to Mexico, and a river that disregards the colonial and national borders. The audience is invited to immerse their heads into one family’s secret boxes to explore sounds, images, and textures of traces of more than a century of border crossings.
cultural exchange rate
On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighborhood, Tania El Khoury and her husband, the historian Ziad Abu-Rish, discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. The pair decided to research the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersections between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations that have shaped both.
What they pieced together is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage. The Search for Power presents a record of El Khoury and Abu-Rish’s conversations, research, and findings in a performance and installation.
the search for power
Memory of Birds is an interactive sound installation that takes place in trees, in collaboration with a trauma therapist and migrating birds. The work explores political violence that literally and figuratively gets buried in contested lands. It centers the artist’s complicated relationship with the land—one that holds trauma, mass graves, and toxicity, a repository of political struggle, a record of power dynamics, and a site of various species migrating for survival.What they pieced together is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage. The Search for Power presents a record of El Khoury and Abu-Rish’s conversations, research, and findings in a performance and installation.