Initially intended as a profile of Tania El Khoury, a renowned multidisciplinary Lebanese artist and recipient of the 2026 Creative Capital Award, this article was abruptly shifted due to the outbreak of conflict. El Khoury, who holds the positions of Distinguished Artist in Residence and Associate Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, is also the founding director of the school’s Center for Human Rights & the Arts. However, on March 2, two days after the United States and Israel initiated their first joint strikes on Iran, Israel began a severe assault on Lebanon. At the time of writing, more than 2,294 Lebanese have died due to Israeli actions, including 177 children and 91 healthcare workers. April 8, labeled as Black Wednesday, saw at least 357 deaths as Israel dropped over 100 bombs on Beirut within 10 minutes. Approximately one-fifth of Lebanon’s population has been displaced. Although a ceasefire was declared on April 16, the Lebanese army has reported multiple Israeli breaches of the truce, urging displaced residents to be cautious when attempting to return home.
Tania El Khoury, originally from Lebanon, is spending a sabbatical year in Beirut with her husband, historian Ziad Abu-Rish, and their daughter Leyl. Their 2018 wedding in the city serves as the backdrop for their interactive live art performance, The Search for Power, which reenacts the real-life blackout that disrupted their wedding ceremony and the subsequent collaborative research effort.
This performance reimagines the archival journey, inviting the audience to participate as wedding guests turned researchers. Seated at a long table adorned with a wedding feast, participants eat, drink, and explore reproductions of key documents that contributed to the couple’s findings. These documents reveal that corruption related to power outages in Beirut predates the Civil War, commonly thought to be the starting point. In fact, inconsistent electricity service, regular blackouts, and public protests against these systemic issues have been occurring since the early 1920s, during French colonial rule in Lebanon.
First staged in Finland in 2019, El Khoury and Abu-Rish brought the performance to New York last year for the Under the Radar Theater Festival. They had planned to start a run in Beirut on March 12, but this was delayed due to the ongoing conflict.
In place of a straightforward profile, the following is a summary of conversations with El Khoury over the past month, discussing her work and how she is managing during this challenging time.
Hyperallergic: First of all, how are you?
Tania El Khoury: I haven’t had the chance to sit and reflect on my well-being. In wartime, we operate in survival mode with heightened alertness. I am fortunate to be safe and housed, unlike a million and a half Lebanese people who are displaced with nowhere to go.
I am, of course, angry that we are witnessing another Israeli war on Lebanon, bringing massacres, destruction, internal strife, and ethnic cleansing. Above all, I mourn the thousands who have died, including medics, journalists, children, and entire families. I also mourn our ancient cities and villages currently being leveled in an Israeli attempt to expand and occupy South Lebanon.
H: Are you and your family safe right now?
TEK: Since Black Wednesday, our apartment and street, where we lived for eight years, are no longer safe. Five of our neighbors were killed, among the over 303 others who died in ten minutes in Lebanon. Our area was considered relatively safe before Wednesday, during this war and the previous one.
Like many of my friends, we’ve been moving our children in and out of Beirut based on the situation. We’re mostly staying with friends and family. It feels better to be surrounded by people in these circumstances.
H: Are you sleeping at all?
TEK: No, we’re not sleeping, but neither is anyone else around me. WhatsApp groups show that nobody is sleeping. I’m in a group from the 2019 protest movement, which includes many artists from across Lebanon. It’s a very political group where everyone constantly reports and analyzes what they’ve seen and heard. Between the shelling and breaking news all night, no one sleeps.
H: Do you notice a difference in public opinion about the war between your arts community in Beirut and the more suburban villages where you grew up?
TEK: In Beirut, especially within the arts scene, there’s a mix of religions, sects, and political affiliations, but most people around us are progressive and left-leaning. The conversation is very different from that in more suburban areas, which are majority Christian and where people tend to feel less personally involved. However, even there, I hear empathy for the displaced and general fear about the war’s duration and impact on the economy and everything else. But people are not as engaged as they are in Beirut; there’s no contest.
H: How did you become an artist? Was it an obvious path for you?
TEK: Not at all. I attended a very traditional school following the French education system, which was strict and harsh. I don’t come from a family of artists.
It’s a good question, how I became an artist, because I don’t remember the details. I feel that being born during the Civil War caused me to block many childhood memories. I went to art school at 18, but I have no idea what happened before that.
H: How did your parents react to your decision to pursue art school?
TEK: We couldn’t afford a private university. I remember telling my father I wanted to attend the Lebanese University, which is public, to study theater. He said, ‘What? But we don’t even watch theater! This is not what we do!’ My family and those around us were working-class people who worked hard to send their children to good schools so they could become upper middle class — doctors, lawyers, like my siblings.
My dad said, ‘You’re going to be poor!’ He found out it was nearly impossible to get into the school, which only accepts 10 or 12 people a year, with some famous actors and directors applying multiple times before gaining entry. I had to perform a monologue in classical Arabic — Antigone, I think it was. Somehow, despite feeling like I was sleepwalking and having no idea what I was doing, I got in.
H: After completing your Master’s and PhD degrees in London, you moved to the US to teach at Bard and lead the Center for Human Rights & the Arts. What’s your experience been like on campus over the past few years?
TEK: The job has been excellent for me as an artist, allowing me to maintain my practice as my main focus, not just something I do in my spare time. This dedication is what I’ve been able to share with students and bring to the college, rather than teaching being separate from my work. We were never silenced at Bard during the genocide in Gaza, and we could organize incredible talks and encourage students to think critically. We’ve been fortunate at Bard.
H: Your work often centers on the resilience of the natural world, like plants, animals, and seashells, which persist despite human destruction. You create moments where viewers find intense calm amidst stories of horrific violence. There’s the hammock with live birdsong in Memory of Birds, the boat ride with a seashell soundtrack in Sejjah lil Malta, and the locker the viewer places their head into in Cultural Exchange Rate.
TEK: I’ve only recently realized that much of my work has a calming effect, which surprised me initially since I always considered my practice more about revenge. I jokingly call it “revenge art.” My way of being “vengeful” is to create works that produce knowledge often not public, not widely circulated, or countering grand narratives or state narratives. So I see the content as my revenge, where my political anger takes form, but the style is different, quite calming. This wasn’t a rational decision at first, but once I recognized the pattern, it became intentional. I now aim to balance heavy content — an oral history of people who were killed, something about migration and border regimes, for instance — with a form that immediately puts your body at ease.
The calming effect is also because my work tends to be multisensory. I like to explore how performance, typically visual, can be experienced sensorily on a different scale, such as one-on-one, very close to your eyes, or vibrating on your body. I use smell extensively. I’m surprised not all artists use smell, as it evokes so much, calms, embodies, and can instantly generate meaning. I use it all the time, and when creating, I like to ask, what does this art smell like?
H: What does it smell like around you right now?
TEK: It’s a pretty awful day. My dad picked sage near his house this morning and handed it to me on my way to Beirut. My car smelled of sage all day. In Beirut, the air smelled stuffy and burnt, like it lacked oxygen, so I kept moving the sage around.
