Laurel V. McLaughlin
-curator-writer-art historian-educator

Information
  1. About
  2. Writing
  3. Curatorial Projects
  4. Public Engagement
  5. Membership
  6. Contact

©2022

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: Installation view, Ulises: Publishing as Practice, Bidoun Library, 2019.

Ulises: Assembly, is a residency and exhibition engaging the labor of bookworkers from the Philadelphia-based collective Ulises. Founded in 2016 and run by members Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, and Ricky Yanas, the bookshop and project space explores the relationships between publics and publications through projects, exhibitions, and residencies asking: “what do you do?” as a means of delving into the printed matters of art publishing today. This project aims to render visible labor, friendships, conviviality, and collectivity of bookworkers as a tribute to their chaotic communality. Ulises: Assembly will be presented at TUAG’s Grossman & Anderson Galleries at SMFA at Tufts campus at 230 Fenway, Boston from August 13 through November 10, 2024 and is the first institutional residency and solo exhibition of the collective.

The collective will realize a bookshop, curated selection of collaborators, and ongoing workshops at the SMFA campus in dialogue with faculty and students. The SMFA public billboard will be contributed by Ulises collaborator Ken Lum. Ulises: Assembly organized by TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin in collaboration with Ulises.

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.“