Artist and CHRA director Tania El Khoury presented Cultural Exchange Rate at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn from January 11-24. This showing was part of Under the Radar festival.
Cultural Exchange Rate is an interactive live art project in which the artist shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria. One marked by war survival, valueless currency collection, brief migration to Mexico, and a river that disregards the colonial and national borders. The audience is invited to immerse their heads into one family’s secret boxes to explore 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 produced by the Fisher Center at Bard.
