Tania El Khoury’s Soothing “Revenge Art”
Hyperallergic profiles Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Tania El Khoury, a Bard College professor and founding director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts, who has been named a 2026 Creative Capital Award winner. The article situates her recent work amid war in Lebanon that began after March 2, following coordinated US and Israeli strikes on Iran, and reports that more than 2,294 Lebanese have been killed by Israel, including 177 children and 91 healthcare workers, with at least 357 deaths on April 8 (“Black Wednesday”) when over 100 bombs were dropped on Beirut in 10 minutes. El Khoury is in Beirut on sabbatical with her husband, historian Ziad Abu-Rish, and their daughter Leyl, and their interactive performance “The Search for Power” (first presented in Finland in 2019 and performed in New York in 2025 for the Under the Radar Theater Festival) was scheduled to open in Beirut on March 12 but was postponed due to the war. The work uses the couple’s 2018 Beirut wedding and a real blackout as a starting point to examine corruption and power outages in Beirut dating back to the early 1920s under French colonial rule, and the article notes that despite an April 16 ceasefire, the Lebanese army has reported violations and displacement remains widespread.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in New Museums, Old Wounds: Restitution and Rehangs