CHRA’s El Khoury and Abu-Rish at Kyoto Experiment 2025
Scene from The Search for Power showing at REDCAT in Los Angeles, CA in June 2025. Photo by Angel Origgi.
Kyoto Experiment will present CHRA Director Tania El Khoury and MA Program Director Ziad Abu-Rish as part of its 2025 program. Officially Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival, the annual event held in Kyoto, Japan since 2010 is dedicated to “inviting radical artists from Japan and abroad” to introduce “works that freely cross genres.”
Kyoto Experiment 2025 will mark the Japan premiere of El Khoury and Abu-Rish’s The Search for Power, featuring simultaneous Japanese interpretation during the live performance (October 4–9) and a Japanese version of the sound installation (October 11–November 16). The live performance and installation versions have both been previously presented in Arabic and English.
El Khoury and Abu-Rish will each give a public talk (October 6 & October 9) as part of Kyoto Experiment 2025 and in collaboration with TOPOS: An Art School as a “Garden” for Mutual Learning
The Search for Power is a research-based artistic collaboration between the artist Tania El Khoury and her historian husband Ziad Abu-Rish as they explore the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersection between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations to shape both. In time, they reach as far back as the introduction of electricity in Beirut before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state. In space, they collect documents across Lebanon and beyond its borders, visiting the archives of colonial powers: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What they find is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage.
As part of their promotion for The Search for Power, Kyoto Experiment published a review of the show in Japanese by Mitsuko Sano, a scholar of Arab film and part-time lecturer at Kyoto University of the Arts.
Post Date: 09-17-2025
Kyoto Experiment 2025 will mark the Japan premiere of El Khoury and Abu-Rish’s The Search for Power, featuring simultaneous Japanese interpretation during the live performance (October 4–9) and a Japanese version of the sound installation (October 11–November 16). The live performance and installation versions have both been previously presented in Arabic and English.
El Khoury and Abu-Rish will each give a public talk (October 6 & October 9) as part of Kyoto Experiment 2025 and in collaboration with TOPOS: An Art School as a “Garden” for Mutual Learning
The Search for Power is a research-based artistic collaboration between the artist Tania El Khoury and her historian husband Ziad Abu-Rish as they explore the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersection between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations to shape both. In time, they reach as far back as the introduction of electricity in Beirut before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state. In space, they collect documents across Lebanon and beyond its borders, visiting the archives of colonial powers: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What they find is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage.
As part of their promotion for The Search for Power, Kyoto Experiment published a review of the show in Japanese by Mitsuko Sano, a scholar of Arab film and part-time lecturer at Kyoto University of the Arts.
Post Date: 09-17-2025
