Performing Arts Center Exhibit Fosters Cultural Exchange

George Caldwell ’24

News Editor

From March 11-16, the Holy Cross community had the opportunity to attend the “Cultural ExchaTania El Khourynge Rate” exhibition at the Prior Performing Arts Center (PAC). Lebanese artist  has created an interactive exhibition in which each participant’s experience is different. Students entered a dark room full of bank safes of varying sizes. Each participant was then handed a ring holding several keys. Each key had a number corresponding to a different safe in the room. Upon unlocking a safe, the participant would look through a curtain at a screen displaying various images with Tania El Khoury’s audio commentary on different aspects of her life story. As the PAC’s website described the scenes, “Khoury recreates a family diary of the borderlands. Her unforgettable installation reveals that the cruelest of borders are invisible to the naked eye, even as they persist across everyday life. ‘Cultural Exchange Rate’ draws on recorded interviews with El Khoury’s late grandmother, oral histories collected from her village in Lebanon, and the discovery of lost relatives in Mexico City.” 

As participants moved from safe to safe, they heard Tania El Khoury’s life story out of chronological order, which reflects the complicated nature of her experience as a Lebanese woman away from her native country. In one safe, the participant would find Mexican government documents showing the faces and names of Lebanese immigrants from the 20th century. A screen would then turn on, playing audio of El Khoury discussing her quest to learn more about her relatives who left Lebanon for Mexico. In another safe, the participant would find bars of soap in front of the screen. El Khoury then described her memories of her Lebanese grandmother, who always washed her hair with this very soap. El Khoury went on to show her grandmother’s recollections of Lebanon’s bloody civil war, which has left lasting instability in the Arabian country. 

In another safe, El Khoury discussed how her son, as the child of a Lebanese woman and a Palestinian man, is denied Lebanese citizenship under the country’s strict naturalization laws. Eventually, the viewer would arrive at a safe where the audio from a phone call between her and her father played. In the clip, Tania and her father explain a scheme that her family once had, to hoard Lebanese bank notes and resell them for a profit. Unfortunately, this plan did not pan out, as the Lebanese Lira has been devalued to the point of being a nearly defunct currency. The entire exhibition is a re-interpretation of this idea, as El Khoury attempts to exchange aspects of her culture with the participant, as if her experiences were a fungible currency whose meaning changes when brought to a new place. At the end of the exhibit, participants are invited to enter the largest safe in the room, where they can exchange their own currency for a Lebanese 1,000 Livres note. This final part of the exhibit is Tania El Khoury’s humorous way of acting out her family’s plan to make a profit off of Lebanon’s devalued currency. With each safe that the participants peered into, they learned more about the complicated nature of Tania El Khoury’s experience. El Khoury’s background as a woman from the Lebanese-Syrian border, with a Palestinian-Lebanese child, and a family history in Mexico is one that forces us to reflect on how cultures clash and interact in an unstable world. With the Cultural Exchange Rate exhibit, Tania El Khoury brought yet another fascinating exhibition to the Prior Performing Arts Center.