Current Writing
Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production is the first monographic, interdisciplinary reader to explore contemporary new media and performance/live art from the South West Asian/ North African (S.W.A.N.A.) region, published by Amherst College Press. The book explores and accounts for the various ways in which her practice exists at and tests borders, whether artistic, academic, or geopolitical. El Khoury identifies as a Lebanese-British artist, who makes “Live Art,” a genre at the intersection of performance, new media, and interactive (social/relational) practices. Her individual practice is always collaborative, often with individuals displaced as migrants or refugees, and activists and revolutionaries from the South West Asian/ North African (S.W.A.N.A.) region. She relates their lived experiences at and across international borders to facilitate critical dialogue about the politics of S.W.A.N.A. and the impact of globalization.
Co-edited by Laurel V. McLaughlin and Carrie Robbins, this volume of essays, or monographic reader, examines her artwork through interdisciplinary perspectives. To delimit its scope in some way, the book uses a single survey exhibition of her works as its framing device and centers on the works included there: Stories of Refuge (2013); Gardens Speak (2014); Camp Pause, 2016; As Far As My Fingertips Take Me (2016); and Tell Me What I Can Do (2018), all of which test the boundaries of aesthetic, political, and everyday norms. This reader restages and broadens the interdisciplinary applicability of El Khoury’s work, inviting scholars, curators, festival organizers, and artists across the disciplines of art history, theater, dance, social work, political science, anthropology, archaeology, museum and archival studies, sociology, and creative writing to contribute essays that activate the complexities of the work.
Authors: Samer Abboud, Ron Berry, Jennie Bradbury, Sue Breakell, David Byers, Kate Craddock, Sascha Crasnow, Beth Derderian, Tania El Khoury, Anan Fareed, Anna Gallagher-Ross, Kinana Issa, Lisa Kraus, Olivia Lamont-Bishop, Gideon Lester, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Carrie Robbins, Abir Saksouk, and Talia Shiroma.
Laurel V. McLaughlin and Mia Habib, “ALL—A Physical Poem of Protest: A Real-Time Negotiation among Strangers,” Bare Bodies—Thresholding Life. Edited by Mariella Griel. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
Bare Bodies—Thresholding Life is dedicated to the theme of bodies – in transition, on thresholds, and at the edges of life. They are discussed in terms of their artistic, political, and existential dimensions. The focus of this artistic-philosophical consideration of the intersection of performance practices and life practices is on processes of emergence, survival, and decay, tracing the emergence of bio- and necropolitics. The book examines performative (life) cycles and their temporal dimension, emphasizing the moment of dwelling at a threshold or transition, thus spinning a relational textual web.
Current Curatorial Projects
Images: Mira Dayal, Cat’s Cradle with Four Knots, 2023. Steel, 60 x 40 x 30 in.
conjunctions at Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia, February 7, 2025 – March 16, 2025 features Dayal’s steel sculptures that reinterpret everyday objects tied to writing and narrative processing, conjunctions blurs the boundaries between tools, toys, and sculptures, emphasizing how objects can shift in function and meaning. Mira Dayal’s “language objects” center on a lexicon of steel sculptures that allude to vernacular objects associated with writing, narrative, and textual processing. The functions of the malleable source objects—to gather, to write, to record, to make an image or story—are notably altered in their more rigid steel counterparts. Components are reattached, bent, doubled, solidified, scaled up, and reoriented. This formal play creates ambiguity, heightens emotional tension, and encourages associative readings.
The exhibition is accompanied by a program at Ulises on Saturday, March 1 at 5 pm, “Language Object Index: Artist Book Launch and Conversation” with Shannon Mattern and Mira Dayal.
Installation views, Waste Scenes, Boston Center for the Arts, January 18–March 29, 2025. Photo: Melissa Blackwell.
Waste Scenes tells non-linear stories about trash, value, and desire in corporate culture and neoliberal capitalism through a new body of work by artists Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales produced during the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR). Given access to the construction and demolition waste stream generated throughout the Tri-state region, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales collected items from the trash piles in a new two-channel video installation Waste Scenes (2025), accompanied by wall drawings, a print series, a movie poster designed with Kristian Henson, and a sound-based performance event in collaboration with Erik DeLuca and Mobius Artists Group members Jimena Bermejo and Sara June for the opening.
The video installation Waste Scenes forms a call and response between trash and its counterpart—humans, often flipping the script between object-subject in vignettes with the Philadelphia Voices of Pride chorus, singer Dan Schwartz, and performers Bellisant Corcoran-Mathe and Parker Sera. The accompanying print series and wall drawings directly cite trash—real estate manuals, neurological textbooks, and puzzles featuring the “American West,” excavating corporate exploitation and empiric expansion. Collectively, Schmidt-Arenales and Chao probe processes of material decomposition—collection, breakdown, and synthesization—as methods of artistic research to dismantle twentieth-century neoliberal systems in tragicomic embodied experimentations.
Waste Scenes is on view at Oregon Contemporary, December 20, 2024–March 9, 2025 and the Boston Center for the Arts, January 18–March 29, 2025.
Current Public Engagement
“Tania El Khoury in Conversation with Laurel V. McLaughlin,” The New Social Environment, The Brooklyn Rail, 2024
Artist Tania El Khoury joins Brooklyn Rail contributor Laurel V. McLaughlin for a conversation engaging El Khoury’s new work Cultural Exchange Rate, 2019.
“The cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye and present in everyday life. The death traps set within a moving body of water and the concealed militarization of faraway border villages. 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 is based on the artist’s recorded interviews with her late grandmother, oral histories collected in her village in Akkar, the discovery of lost relatives in Mexico City, and the family’s attempt to secure dual citizenship.“