Tania El Khoury

LAB Commission / U.S. Premiere

The cruelest borders are invisible to the eye and present in everyday life: the death traps set within a moving body of water and the concealed militarization of faraway border villages. Cultural Exchange Rate is an interactive live art project in which artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria, marked by war, survival, valueless currency collections, brief migration to Mexico, and a river that disregards colonial and national borders.

Audience members are invited to immerse themselves in one family’s secret boxes to explore the sounds, images, and textures of traces of more than a century of border crossings.

Cultural Exchange Rate is based on the artist’s recorded interviews with her late grandmother, oral histories collected in her village in Akkar, the discovery of lost relatives in Mexico City, and the family’s attempt to secure dual citizenship.

Cultural Exchange Rate is cocommissioned by the Fisher Center, Spielart Munich, and Onassis Stegi Athens.