Books

Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production

Edited by Laurel V. McLaughlin & Carrie Robbins

Amherst College Press

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Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first reader to examine the practice of Tania El Khoury, a live artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. El Khoury has conceived and created works about lived experiences at and across international borders in collaboration with migrants, refugees, and displaced persons as well as other artists, performers, and revolutionaries. This interdisciplinary and multimedia reader features essays by artists, curators, and scholars who explore the dynamic possibilities and complexities of El Khoury’s art. From social workers to archeologists to archivists, contributing authors engage with the radical epistemological and political revolutions that El Khoury and her collaborators invite us all to join.

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The Search for Power

Tania El Khoury & Ziad Abu-Rish

Tadween Publishing

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Based on The Search for Power lecture-performance, this book contains the performance script, designed archival documents, and reflections by the collaborating artist and historian. On a night with a sudden electricity blackout in Beirut, the artist and her historian husband discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War, the artist grew up thinking that the problem of electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled power outages across Beirut. The two decided to go on a journey to document the history of blackouts in Lebanon. Most were not accessible. The paper trail led them through archives in five different countries. They reached as far back as 1906 when electricity was first introduced to Beirut. They found a transnational story involving businessmen, politicians, warlords, multinational corporations, and colonial powers. They discovered traces of everyday acts of survival, resistance, and sabotage by company workers and electricity users.

Gardens Speak

Tania El Khoury

Tadween Publishing

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Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protestors who adorned the streets during the early periods of the uprising. These domestic burials play out a continuing collaboration between the living and the dead. The dead protect the living by not exposing them to further danger at the hands of the regime. The living protect the dead by conserving their identities, telling their stories, and not allowing their deaths to become instruments of the regime.

Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation that toured around the world. It contains the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves would have recounted it. This book contains the narrative text of those ten oral histories in both English and spoken Arabic. It includes an acknowledgement and introduction by the artist, and illustrations of the audience experience in Gardens Speak.

Common Ground

Edited by Tania El Khoury

The Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard

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Talks on Human Rights & the Arts 3: Common Ground is the third volume in talks by activists, scholars, and artists from around the globe. This collection is curated around the themes of land and food rights. The talks were presented at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) in association with Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food, produced by the Fisher Center at Bard LAB – co-curated by Gideon Lester and Tania El Khoury. Through their own words and conversations with others, the talks make evident the richness and range of contemporary practices at the intersection of human rights and the arts.

Contributors include: Baha Hilo, Danielle Purifoy, Juliana Steiner, Jumana Manna, Michael Rakowitz, Nicolas Galanin, and Zayaan Khan.

“We reclaimed moments of disobedience found in harvest gatherings, seed exchanges, humor despite catastrophe, and a rootedness in the ground—a ground that is common to all yet capable of regenerating even through toxicity.” – Tania El Khoury

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The Lawlessness of Rights

Edited by Tania El Khoury

The Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard

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The 2nd book in the series Talks on Human Rights & the Arts: The Lawlessness of Rights is based on talks by activists, scholars, and artists from around the globe, presented at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. In their own words and in conversation with others, they make evident the richness and range of contemporary practices at the intersection of human rights and the arts.

Read digital copy here.

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