Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury is an artist working between London and Beirut. She creates interactive installations and challenging performances in which the audience is an active collaborator which have toured extensively and internationally.  She has just been announced as the recipient of the ANTI Festival's International Prize for Live Art 2017, and has also received the Total Theatre Innovation Award and the Arches Brick Award 2011.

She is completing a practice-based PhD in the Departments of Drama and Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. Her research and publications focus on the political dimension of interactive Live Art in the wake of the Arab uprisings. She is also the co-founder of Beirut-based Dictaphone Group, a research and performance collective aiming at questioning our relationship to the city and redefining its public space.

In the last few years, Tania has worked in collaboration with a number of communities such as fishermen in Beirut, refugees across Lebanon, asylum-seekers in Germany, a women’s shelter in Tunis, and water taxi drivers in Malta, among others. Her Live Art practice takes various shapes, including city walks, site-specific or lecture performances, and video and sound installations. The work takes place in spaces as small as a cable car and as large as the Mediterranean Sea, in addition to cafés, galleries, and museums. The common premise of these works is audience interactivity. Tania’s overarching artistic concerns are anchored in examining the politics and ethics of the encounter with both the urban space and the audience. She regularly collaborates with urban researchers and employs oral history in her performances. Tania’s work aims at engaging with the politics of space and the writing of history from below.

Read Tania's contribution to LADA's Restock, Rethink, Reflect 3 project on Live Art and Feminism and Documenting Intimacy.


 

Categories: Featured Artist


Date Posted: 24 October 2017