This was supposed to be a profile of Tania El Khoury, the multidisciplinary Lebanese artist, 2026 Creative Capital Award winner, Distinguished Artist in Residence and Associate Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, and founder and director of the school’s Center for Human Rights & the Arts. But then war broke out. On March 2, two days after the United States and Israel launched their first coordinated attacks on Iran, the latter began its brutal bombing of Lebanon. At the time of writing this, more than 2,294 Lebanese have been murdered by Israel, including 177 children and 91 health workers. At least 357 of these deaths occurred on April 8 Black Wednesdaywhen Israel dropped more than 100 bombs on Beirut in 10 minutes. About a fifth of the country’s population has been displaced. Despite the April 16 ceasefire, the Lebanese army has done so reported several Israeli violations of the ceasefireand the displaced are told to exercise caution when attempting to return home.
Lebanese-born El Khoury is in Beirut on a sabbatical with her husband, historian Ziad Abu-Rish, and their daughter Leyl. The couple’s 2018 wedding in the city serves as the backdrop for their interactive live art performance The search for powerwhich reenacts the true story of the blackout that interrupted their wedding celebration, and the joint research project that followed.
The play reimagines this archival adventure, with the audience playing the role of wedding guests-come-researchers. Seated around a long table with a wedding cornucopia, we eat, drink and leaf through reproductions of the key documents that informed the couple’s discoveries. What we learn is that the story of corruption behind Beirut’s blackouts goes back much further than the civil war, when it is widely believed to have started. In fact, irregular service, routine power outages, and popular protests against these systemic failures have been ongoing since the early 1920s, when Lebanon was under French colonial rule.
El Khoury and Abu Rish were first presented in Finland in 2019 and performed the show in New York last year for the Under the Radar Theater Festival. They were supposed to start a run in Beirut on March 12, but it was postponed due to the war.
Rather than a neat profile, the following is an abbreviated version of a series of conversations I’ve had with El Khoury over the past month about her work and how she’s doing during this difficult time.
Hyperallergic: First of all, how are you?
Tania El Khoury: I haven’t had a chance to think about how I’m doing. I think in the context of war we function in survival mode and hyper vigilance. I am privileged to be safe and housed, while a million and a half Lebanese are displaced and have nowhere to go.
I am of course angry that we are witnessing yet another Israeli war against Lebanon, with all the devastation it brings in the form of massacres, destruction, internal conflict and ethnic cleansing. Above all, I mourn the thousands of people killed in Lebanon to date, including medics, journalists, children and entire families. And I mourn our ancient towns and villages that are currently being razed to the ground in an Israeli attempt to expand and occupy southern Lebanon.
H: Are you and your family safe right now?
TEK: Since Black Wednesday, our apartment, where we lived for eight years, and our street are no longer safe. Five of our neighbors were murdered, among more than 303 others killed in ten minutes in Lebanon. Before Wednesday, our area was considered relatively safe – during this war and the previous war.
Like many of my friends, we take our children in and out of Beirut depending on the situation. We mainly stay with friends and family. And it feels better to be surrounded by people in these circumstances.
H: Do you sleep at all?
TEK: No. We don’t sleep. But you know, everyone around me is sleep deprived too. In the WhatsApp groups you see that no one sleeps. I’m in one of the protest movement from 2019 – this one has tons of artists from all over Lebanon, so it’s a very political group, and everyone is constantly reporting what they’ve seen and heard, and constantly analyzing the situation. So between the shelling and the breaking news happening all night, no one sleeps.
H: Do you sense a difference in public opinion about the war between your art community in Beirut and the more suburban villages where you grew up?
TEK: The city and especially the art scene in Beirut is a very mixed place when it comes to religion, sects and political leanings, but most of the people around us are progressive and left-wing. So it’s a very different conversation than what’s happening in more suburban areas that are predominantly Christian.You are where people feel less personally involved. But even there, all I hear is empathy for the people who have been displaced, and fear in general about how long this will last, what the effect will be on the economy, on everything. But the people are not as involved as in Beirut, there is no doubt about that.
H: How did you end up becoming an artist? Was it an obvious path for you?
TEK: Not at all. I went to a very traditional school – the French education system – which was quite strict, quite harsh. And I don’t come from a family of artists at all.
It’s a good question: how did I become an artist, because I don’t really remember the details. I feel like because I was born during the Civil War, I blocked out a lot of my childhood memories. I went to art school when I was 18, but I actually have no idea what happened before that.
H: How did your parents react to your decision to go to art school?
TEK: We couldn’t afford a private university. I remember telling my father that I wanted to go to the Lebanese university, which is public, and that I wanted to study theater. He said, ‘What? But we don’t even watch theater! This is not what we do!’ My family and the people around us were working class people, who worked hard to get their children into good schools so they could be upper middle class – doctors, lawyers. That’s what my other siblings did.
My father said, “You’re going to be poor!” He asked around and discovered that it was virtually impossible to get into the school. They only hire ten or twelve people a year, and even some famous actors and directors had to apply three or four times before they got in. I had to give a monologue in classical Arabic – AntigoneI think it was. Somehow, even though I made it look like I was sleepwalking, and I had no idea what I was doing, I got in.
H: You earned your master’s and PhD degrees in London before coming to the U.S. to teach at Bard and direct the Center for Human Rights & the Arts. What has the climate been like on campus for you in recent years?
TEK: It has really been a great job for me as an artist because I have been able to keep my practice as my main profession – not something I do in my spare time. I have been able to share this dedication with the students and bring it to the university, instead of teaching being something separate from my work. And we at Bard were never silenced during the genocide in Gaza. We had the freedom to organize incredible lectures and get students to think critically. We got lucky at Bard.
H: Much of your work focuses on the resilience of the natural world: plants, animals and even shells, which stick to their routines and carry on despite the human destruction that surrounds them. And you often choreograph these moments in which the viewer gains access to a kind of intense peace while confronted with stories of horrific violence. There’s the hammock with the live symphony of birdsong in Memory of Birds; the boat ride with a seashell soundtrack in Sejjah lil Malta; the locker the viewer sticks her head into in Cultural Exchange Rate.
TEK: I only recently realized that a lot of my work has this calming effect, which was surprising at first because I always thought my practice was more about revenge. I jokingly call it ‘revenge art’. My way of being “vengeful” is to create works that produce knowledge that is often not public, that is not widely distributed, or that contradicts the grand narrative or the state narrative. So I see the content as my revenge, or where my political anger takes shape, but the form is, yeah, very different, quite soothing. At first this wasn’t a rational decision, but once I recognized the pattern as something I do often, it has become more intentional. So now I try to find a balance between heavy content – an oral history of murdered people, something about migration and border regimes, for example – and a form that immediately puts your body at ease.
I think the calming effect also comes from the fact that my work is multisensory. I like to play with how performances, which are normally mainly visual, can be experienced sensory when they are on a completely different scale. So whether it’s one-on-one, or very close to your eyes, or if it vibrates on your body. I use a lot of fragrance. Actually, I’m surprised that not all artists use scent, because it is a feeling that evokes so much, it soothes, it fully embodies and can generate meaning immediately. So I use it all the time and when I’m creating I like to ask myself, what does this art smell like?
H: What does it smell like around you right now?
TEK: It’s a pretty awful day. My father chose [some] sage next to his house this morning and handed it to me as I was on my way to Beirut. My car smelled like sage all day. In Beirut the air smelled stuffy and burnt, as if there was no oxygen, so I continued to move the sage around.
