Installation and Audience Collaboration with Tania El Khoury

Nabra Nelson: Salam Alaikum. Welcome to Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Kunafa and Shay discusses and analyzes contemporary and historical Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, and Southwest Asian and North African, or SWANA, theatre from across the region.

Marina Johnson: I’m Marina.

Nabra: And I’m Nabra.

Marina: And we are your hosts.

Nabra: Our name, Kunafa and Shay, invites you into the discussion in the best way we know how: with complex and delicious sweets like kunafa and perfectly warm tea, or in Arabic, shay.

Marina: Kunafa and Shay is a place to share experiences, ideas, and sometimes to engage with our differences. In each country in the MENA or SWANA world, you’ll find kunafa made differently. In that way, we also lean into the diversity, complexity and robust flavors of MENA and SWANA Theatre. We bring our own perspectives, research, and special guests in order to start a dialogue and encourage further learning and discussion.

Nabra: Welcome to the fifth season of Kunafa and Shay, where we delve into the dynamic world of performance art across the region. We’re highlighting the creative, innovative, and artistic disruption of performance artists, exploring how their art serves as a powerful medium for expression and social change. This season features interviews with performance artists who challenged norms and use their craft to further conversations about topics like identity, diaspora, homeland, and futurity.

Marina: This episode features Tania El Khoury, a live artist who creates interactive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory, and visual materials collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work engages questions of displacement border systems, privatization and the politics of space in how they’re shaped through nation-building projects and colonial legacies.

Nabra: Tania El Khoury is a live artist and the director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, as well as a distinguished artist in residence in the theatre and performance program at Bard College. Since 2017, Tania has co-curated two editions of the Fisher Center LAB Biennial, both featuring commissions of her own artistic work. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and shown globally in spaces ranging from national museums to fishing boats. She’s the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Bessie Outstanding Production Award, Soros Art Fellowship, International Live Art Prize, Total Theatre Innovation Award, and Arches Brick Award. She’s co-founder of Dictaphone Group, an urban research and live art collective in Lebanon.

Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her publications include The Search for Power and Gardens Speak (Tadween Publishing); “Camp Pause: Stories from Rashidieh Camp and the Sea” (Jadaliyya); “Performing the Arab” (Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research); “The Scenography of The Revolution,” “Two Live Artists in the Theatre,” and “Swimming in Sewage, Political Performances in the Mediterranean” (all in Performance Research); and “We Are All Witnesses: The Arab Spring in Photos and Electronic Wars,” as well as “Spaces and Bodies in Arab Revolutionary Art” (both in Journal of Palestine Studies).

Tania teaches performance, live art and spatial justice, audience interactivity, and the intersection of art and activism.

Marina: Hi, Tania. It’s so good to be in the recording room with you. Thank you so much for joining us today. We’re big fans of your work.

Tania El Khoury: Marhaba. Thank you so much. I’m excited to be with you,.

Marina: So in your bio that we just read, you described yourself, and we described you, as a live artist. Can you describe–what is live art? What is your understanding of that and how would you describe it to someone who may not know what that is?

Tania: Live art means art that is simply consumed live. So that’s kind of the easy way to say, it is very much centered on liveness, on encounter with an audience. I really like that term because it’s generated in the UK where I studied and practiced live art for a while. And it generated by artists of color who found themselves a little bit marginalized from performance art, which they understood as gallery-centric and also white practice of art. And live art is described by many people and I recommend people to read the description of Live Art Development Agency, which is a brilliant agency kind of based in London, and they have various ways of describing live art.

But the one that stuck with me is a fact that it’s a research engine, that it’s kind of a practice that resists description in a kind of traditional way. You can really use it as an umbrella term under which you create performance, you also create video art, video performances, you create interactive sound installations, et cetera. And the most important part of it is that it’s always innovative. It always really bends artistic form in a way that will fit the content in a way that will fit the focus of the work. And second is the fact that it’s just really centered on that encounter with the audience.

Nabra: That’s really exciting to hear. I think both Marina and I think about all of that as in theatre, but thinking about this greater umbrella term that can also allow for multidisciplinary arts forms is very exciting. And I’d never heard that term before, so I’m excited to use it now.

Tania: Yeah. So for people who don’t know, I’ve recently moved to New York. I am based at Bard College right now as an artist in residence, and I also direct the Center for Human Rights and the Arts. And I remember when I moved here, someone sat me down and said, “There is no live art in the US. Stop saying you’re a live artist. If anything here you are a visual artist.” Just because I actually come from theatre, I’ve studied theatre all my life, I did the BA, MA, even PhD in theatre, but I never created work for the stage. If you’re interested, I’m happy to give you my reasoning why I never created work for the stage or why I felt kind of, I don’t know, kind of moved away from it. But yeah, so I was told that perhaps, as I am more of a visual artist, funnily enough.

Nabra: I think we need new terms, especially multidisciplinary and more broader terms are so needed for artists working today that I think are expanding the idea of what any one given art form is.

Tania: Totally.

Nabra: And because we of course, are mainly a theatre podcast, we would absolutely love to hear why you did not do work for the stage. I’m very curious.

Tania: The story began... I come from a working-class family in Lebanon, and I came once to my parents as a seventeen-year-old and announced that I will be going to a theatre school for my BA. And I remember my father said, “What? Not only none of us come from theatre, we don’t even watch theatre.” I remember feeling like, “Ohh yeah, we don’t watch theatre.” But so, I think relationship in a lot of places that theatre is a little bit elitist. This is kind of people who come from marginalized places or areas that are not really centered in the capital, don’t really grow up watching theatre. And in my university studies and the public college in Lebanon, the theatre also had this kind of intellectual vibe to it. And I was very politicized at the time. I was really involved in, or I was focused on being, on trying to be an activist and questioning everything around us.

And I remember feeling that the practice is actually very bourgeois. The fact that we are there performing on a stage for the middle and upper classes to entertain them, it’s not something that I wanted to do. So from the beginning I wanted the audience to be somehow involved. I wanted the relationship to be more horizontal. So from those politics I found myself creating interactive works that are also immersive, without even knowing that word in English. At the time I didn’t even spoke English. I’m French-educated, I learned a bit of English, but not after I actually traveled and start touring and I lived in London that I realized that this actually exists as a form, something that I did very naturally and kind of organically.

I wanted to bend that relationship between the audience and the fourth world, bend it and create work that puts the audience and the performers or the art in direct conversation, have been practiced by many other people. So since then I only created work that is interactive that really think about audience interactivity as a form, but also as a politics. So, what happens to the audience when they find themselves in the work? What is that gives them in terms of responsibility? So they’re not just spectating, but they’re witnessing. They are part of the work they carry in their bodies after they leave.

I think oral history by itself cultivates solidarity because we know a lot about event as kind of a big headlines and grand narratives. When we attempt to look at history from below and look at ordinary people’s stories within those major events, this by itself kind of cultivates a different solidarity

Nabra: Absolutely. That’s really exciting to hear, to give a deeper idea of what that work looks like... And we’ll link it, of course, there’s a lot of documentation on your website, which I really appreciate for those of us who have not yet experienced that work in person.

But can you talk about maybe what you’re currently working on or a favorite piece or something that’s kind of in your mind these days?

Tania: Sorry, I always laugh about the idea of favorite piece ’cause it feels like I love them all the same. They’re all my children. Funnily enough, I get asked this question often and I’m like, “What do you mean I have a favorite?”

I’m currently touring. I’m currently touring works that... Some of my works have been touring for a decade, and others are more recent. So I just toured my most recent work called Memory of Birds. And this is an interactive piece that invites the audience to lay down in a structure around a tree and they kind of hug the tree while they’re lying down in that structure and listen to a sound piece that takes them through kind of a story about bird migration, but also the different toxicity and political violence that are hidden in the soil, and really thinking about the soil as this body of the earth that holds a lot of those traumas.

It is a collaboration that I did with a trauma therapist who will guide the audience as well with a voice in that piece and invite you to have the spatial awareness of a bird and to just become one with that landscape. It’s a very gentle piece, a gentle experience. Gives you that moment to be with the tree with the bird and then kind of disappear. I’m also touring another work, one of the most recent work called Culture Exchange Rate, and this piece I did at the beginning of the economic collapse that is currently happening in Lebanon. So really it reflects on our relationship with money and currency, especially working-class people and families. It also follows my own family history for about a whole century of people’s relationship to money currency and also their relationship to migration and border crossing. So we come from a border village between Lebanon and Syria and I talk about how my grandmother, my late grandmother, how she is older than the colonial border and never really took seriously that border and always kind of crossed it as people do.

And then about a brief migration to Mexico City, brief within the century of history. And as part of this work, I go to Mexico and I meet some of our lost relatives there and attempt to find traces of my family there. So this is a piece also, it’s kind of immersive. It invites you to open. It is really set that has lots of cabinets and as an audience you have a set of keys and you open cabinets and kind of stick your head in those cabinets. And every cabinet has a total different... We can think of them as scenes since we’re discussing theatre, but they’re really various elements. And it’s multisensory: there’s smell, there’s sound, there’s kind of vibration. Sometimes there’s taste, the tactile, and you are really digging in the personal archive, the collective archive, but also state archive. So I found a lot of the immigration cards of people who migrated in the twenties and start looking through them to find my great-grandfather. And then link that to conversation that we have over WhatsApp with my family trying to understand if this is the one who is our great-grandfather or not. And so there is humor in it, but there’s also stories of survival and border crossing and economic collapses.

Nabra: And they experience all of that through this installation. It’s opening each of these cupboards or is there a person there, or how do people learn about all these elements and stories?

Tania: So a lot of these work function without performers, but I still do think of them as a performance, as in it’s the audience who become the performer. Of course, some of my works do actually have performers in them—I perform in them or other performers I collaborate with on—but there are, these two pieces that I mentioned, it’s the audience who activate them. So you could think of them as installations that get activated by the audience, and they are time-based, so they really have a beginning and an end, and audience follow set of instructions. I often work with audience guides, and these audience guide are there to kind of support the audience, but also set the mood for the piece and relay the instructions.

Marina: I love this so much, and I hope that I get to experience one of your pieces in person someday soon. So you talked a little bit about how some of these ideas might come to be. In the last instance it was really thinking about the colonial borders and family experiences, but also what is archived in the records and how can we combine this with stories that you’ve been told with the actual tactile of keys, which I find really provocative. I’m sure that every piece is very different from where you get the idea to how it progresses, but how do you usually go about fostering an idea from when you have it to it sort of becoming something in which an audience can interact with it?

Tania: This is a great question actually because this kind of taps on the crucial element of live art or the live art that I personally create or I’m interested in. It’s the fact that the form does not need to abide by any rule, by any sort of set relationship, which a more traditional theatre has to often abide by, like kind of an audience sitting passively in the dark, a stage manager, a light designer, etc. This type of work really gives you the potential of recreating its rules every time you create work. and that’s what I’m really interested about. It feels very, very open. So I often think about the form and the content or my political motivation, really they start together. So I’ll give you an example of for example, Gardens Speak, which is one of the pieces that I toured the most. I created in 2013 in Lebanon and then started touring from 2014.

And since then I think it traveled to more than thirty different cities around the world, got translated into seven different languages, and got published into a book. Gardens Speak, for example, I saw the interest in that piece was when at the beginning of the Syrian uprising, I saw a circulating photo on social media as a woman sitting in her, standing in her garden, with a pile of dirt next to her. And there was a comment about, “This is what we have to do right now. We are hiding our own martyrs in our own gardens.” And I was very struck by it. It really felt like, okay, at a time when the Syrian regime and other people, counter-revolutionary forces, are denying that there is anybody dying because of the protest against the dictatorship is happening, we are seeing people burying their loved one in their own gardens as a way to protect those funerals, to protect those bodies, et cetera.

And probably because I’m Lebanese who was born during the war and I know as a fact that we continue to be walking over mass graves all over Lebanon without any sort of... Because of our ruling class has this complete impunity over the crimes. It struck me, and immediately I thought of it, because I’m an artist who work like that, I thought about this kind of audience all over the world or people invited to stick their ear to the ground and listening to stories of people who were buried in gardens, buried in public gardens. And that image, so you’d say that I started with this image, the image that I saw but also the image that I imagined that involved the audience from the beginning. And that image stayed with me for a while, and I started researching the stories and just trying to understand why this is what’s happening. Is this a regular practice now? And the politics and the reasons.

And then I created this piece that actually invite the audience to put their ear to the ground. The piece itself has four tons of soil and speakers, like small speakers buried in them and it invites audience to dig with their bare hands in the soil and get close to a sound piece, listen to it. And the sound piece is oral history that we’ve collected, various people who are killed at the beginning of the Syrian uprising. An audience is invited to listen to it and then bury it back. And this is an example of how the audience is very much part of the concept of the piece from the very beginning.

So unlike, I think, what we are taught to create as artists, we’re taught to create art alone and then bring it to the audience. And sometimes we get surprised by the audience because we kind of imagine it differently and then we put it out there and audience, they have agency, they’re humans. And I tend to create, and even when I teach a student or young artists, I try to invite us to think about or create art from the point of view of an audience journey from the beginning.

Nabra: And then to take it a step further, I’d also love to hear about that post-production. I guess you have all these touring pieces. Can you talk about how you find partners or where you look to take this work? What are those mechanisms? How you advocate for yourself as an artist as well as actually bring your work to so many different audiences? I’m thinking about other artists who are doing maybe installation-based work. How do you actually share that, or who are your partners, is also a question that I’m interested in sharing with folks.

When we use those oral histories in an immersive multi-sensory way, we are inviting people, the audience, to take those stories not just rationally, but with their bodies. And I think the hope at least is that people, those stories, become part of you.

Tania: Yeah, I think a lot of these pieces start... How to go about it. I’d say that most of my work tour in festivals, art festivals. Sometimes they’re theatre festivals; sometimes they’re multidisciplinary festivals. And I think, yeah, I started by creating work anyway, work that was very low budget that I create by myself. For example, I created a piece called Maybe If You Choreograph Me You Will Feel Better. It really cost nothing to create; I did everything about myself in this piece. I toured it, I took it to Edinburgh Festival as part of a collective of artist called Forest Fringe who used to put in a free program, free for artists to show their work but also free for the audience to see, in a squatted building run by artists called Forest. And that program became quite big. A lot of people were interested in it; there was a lot of innovation in it.

And that particular piece won two awards at Edinburgh [Fringe Festival], which was quite major for someone who’s quite young. And I did as a one-on-one piece, so very limited people got to see it. But I was lucky that people saw it and gave it awards that year, and it helped me tour it. And with a lot of my work, I would say that someone would invite me to tour it, and then other people would see it at the festival and then they kind of start touring, and they have a life of their own. I do realize that this is, perhaps, lucky. Some people do show work at festival, and they don’t necessarily tour. But I would say that it was important for me to create work anyway and to create it in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t cost a lot of money, that doesn’t require a studio for it to be created.

It doesn’t require a budget, even like it relies on a lot of tools that are around. And it really just centered about a good concept and a interesting rapport with the audience. And then by touring a little bit more and having more support, I started to be commissioned and given a little bit bigger budget to collaborate with people that I want to collaborate with other artists. And I personally, perhaps this is interesting for other artists, is that I found the most important collaboration that I made are with people who are outside of the art world. So for example, architects, urban researchers, historians. And I think that kind of brings different depths to the work that it’s really brings forward research that is needed or work that is about a contested space or a contested event.

Marina: In your bio you talk about the fact that your work deals with the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. And I think we’ve talked about... The collective memory feels very evident to me. But I love the phrase “cultivation of solidarity” because I feel like it’s something that my work also strives to do to: cultivate solidarity between people. And your work is often triangulating between people in different countries too. But I was curious if you could talk more about the phrase, “cultivate solidarity,” especially because what I love about your work that is not necessarily evident in traditional theatre is that it really sees the audience as agential. And so when you’re acknowledging the audience’s agency, how also are you maybe guiding towards a solidarity, or are you revealing solidarities? I’m just curious if you can talk more about those sort of threads.

I think oral history by itself cultivates solidarity because we know a lot about event as kind of a big headlines and grand narratives. When we attempt to look at history from below and look at ordinary people’s stories within those major events, this by itself kind of cultivates a different solidarity.

Tania: Part of this cultivating solidarity I would say comes from audience interactivity and the fact that these works invite the audience to an immersive experience in which they are not only spectating, they are not only listening or understanding the material, but they are also immersed in it. And I do think about this kind of embodied knowledge that gets seeped in through sometimes through the skin, through the smell, through this kind of multi-sensory experience. So I’ve started to think about that, especially in relationship to oral histories. I think oral history by itself cultivates solidarity because we know a lot about event as kind of a big headlines and grand narratives. When we attempt to look at history from below and look at ordinary people’s stories within those major events, this by itself kind of cultivates a different solidarity.

There’s a shared human experience vulnerability in that. And I think when we use those oral histories in an immersive multi-sensory way, we are inviting people, the audience, to take those stories not just rationally, but with their bodies. And I think the hope at least is that people, those stories, become part of you. There is writing also about what the difference between spectating and witnessing and for example, when you witness, you have a political responsibility. So you’re really, again, cultivating solidarity by inviting people to witness rather than just watch.

Marina: That’s so beautiful. Thank you. Hearing the way you describe oral history and how you can instrumentalize it in this way is really just striking to me.

Nabra: And I’m also thinking about, you said that how these stories, these feelings of solidarity, seep through different parts of you and even through your skin. And I’m thinking about two of your pieces where folks actually write or draw on somebody else’s arm, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me. And then there’s a sequel, As Far As Isolation Goes. So that really brought the medium of those pieces to the forefront for me that it’s actually seeping those stories through someone’s skin. Can you just talk a little bit more about those pieces and describe more about what they are for our audience? Because I think that’s just such a different way of thinking about how you take in art in a really visceral way.

Tania: Yeah. So As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a collaboration with Basel Zaraa, who is an artist who was born as a Palestinian refugee in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. And I was invited to create work reflecting on migration and borders, and I had this idea that the artwork really need to be touched by a refugee to actually be moved, literally be touched. So just the idea started almost like a joke and a comment on kind of humoring the artwork connection to what they called “refugee crisis” as if it’s like a European crisis rather than it’s the refugees themselves who are in crisis. So I did invite Basel, I actually dreamt of this idea and then I created it exactly how I dreamt of it, which is a wall, a white gallery wall with a hole in it and an audience put their arm in that hole and then Basel is on the other side of the wall.

He’s telling them, “Hey, my name’s Basel. I was born a refugee. For a lot of us, this is not a new thing. We have been in limbo for many generations. And in fact we were made refugees again because of the Syrian regime kind of attack on Yarmouk refugee camp,” et cetera. And so they listened to that story through a headphone, and then Basel created a song, rap song that they listened to and throughout he is drawing these kind of characters. This is a tattoo version of it that I did, but they’re like a long group of people walking up. And so they walk in journey cross your arm, and Basel is touching their arm, but they don’t see him. They don’t have this kind of visual connection. They don’t know who’s touching their arm. And they have that kind of tactile experience. It’s very gentle. They don’t see what is being drawn till the very end. They see that and sometimes they meet, sometimes they don’t. Basel decides if he has the energy to meet people or not.

It’s very kind of also giving him that agency that he doesn’t feel like he’s on the spot, but it’s the audience who’s on the spot actually. If people passing by, they see the audience there. And what we didn’t know later, it wasn’t in my dream obviously, that these people start disappearing bit by bit from your arm. And people were very affected by it. They kept seeing, they kept trying not to make them go. Someone told me she kept it for two weeks showering with her arm out. She told me that and I was like, “Well, that’s gross.” And then a couple of people said that they want to tattoo it, and I’ve only seen one, but I saw someone who actually tattooed the whole thing across their chest. It’s a very simple, it’s a one-on-one ten-minute piece that I dreamt of and we created for one event, but really moved people. And it worked as a relationship, as a very short engaged, tactile experience, and it kept touring. And that piece also went to around the world and got translated quite significantly.

Marina: Yeah, I found myself very affected as you’re describing the person who doesn’t want to wash them off, especially right now because as we are talking and there’s a genocide happening, it feels like I have very little control over things. But this person was thinking, “I have control over my arm and so I can’t let something happen to these people on my arm.” And yeah, wow.

We don’t have much time left. And I wanted to pivot just a little and ask you: you’re the director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and this is such an amazing position, and could you describe to us what you do in this role and also how this translates, if it does, into your own art making practice as well?

Tania: So I was invited here as an artist. I was first invited to create work, as a commissioned artist to create work and to collaborate with the Fisher Center here at Bard on co-creating a festival on borders and create my own work as part of it. And then from that experience, there was this conversation about working with the human rights program and the human rights project here at Bard, which have always collaborated with artists and art. And there was this idea of creating something together and being artist-led. So I was invited as an artist to lead that center. The center has an international MA program, so really is open for activists and artists from around the world who come in on scholarship obviously. And they create work, and they also take human rights discourse and human rights courses. And it’s really bringing activism and research on politics and methodologies and human rights discourse with multidisciplinary art creation and put in it on equal foot in the center and this MA program.

What I do personally as part of my residency here is that I create a program along with my colleagues, for example, a series of talks on human rights and the arts, and these series of talks usually culminate in publications. I collaborate with activists around the world and really take activists seriously as producers of knowledge, as well as artists, as also producers of knowledge. We create international festivals every two to four years. And in that festival, I often also create my own work, create a new work. So this is really it. I really see it as a continuation of my work and continuation of the way I like to collaborate and the way I like to practice the politics and the work ethics that I care about.

Marina: It sounds incredible. I am so grateful for the work that you’re doing. I mean, I’ve known of your work for a while, but in the past year people have just been coming up to me and they’re like, “Do you know Tania El Khoury’s work? I think you’d be really interested.” I was like, “Yes, I know. I hope to meet her someday in person.” And as you’re describing the work that you’re doing right now, I was like, oh my gosh, is this the dream job? As you’re describing it, I’m like, I’m getting my PhD and I’ll teach and direct, that’s what’s in my life. But wow, I’m just really so excited that because sometimes I’m making work and I’m like, is this affecting anything? That really taking artists and activists seriously as producers of knowledge, as you said, is so important. And I feel like it’s actually quite novel to hear it because it doesn’t happen all the time. So thank you for the work that you’re doing. It’s really incredible. Yeah.

Nabra: We’ll be looking out for all of your installations and performances where we are. Please bring them to California soon, and it’s been such a thrill and really inspiring to hear from you. Thank you for joining us today, Tania.

Marina: Yes, thank you so much.

Tania: You’re welcome. Thank you for reaching out and thank you for doing this podcast.

Marina: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching HowlRound wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode, along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on the, howlround.com website. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons. Yalla.

Nabra: Yalla. Bye.

Marina: Yalla! Bye.