Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends & General Presale: from 24 AΡR 2019, 14:00
Full price: 10 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 8 €
Νeighborhood residents, Groups 10+ people: 7 €
People with disabilities, Companions & Unemployed: 5 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@sgt.gr
Information
The performance starts exactly at 20:00. Please be sure that you arrive at the starting point 10 minutes prior to the start time.
We recommend comfortable clothes and shoes.
No wheelchair access
Language: In English (with no translation into Greek)
Introduction
A city is plunged into darkness. Artist Tania El Khoury illuminates the story of electric power in Beirut in order to talk about the dark sides of history, and inaccessible knowledge. How can we record the things happening around us and how can we become an active part of them?
A power outage one night in Beirut inspired Tania El Khoury to explore the history of power outages in Lebanon. Together with her historian husband, Ziad Abu-Rish, the artist set out on a journey that took them both all the way back to 1906, when Beirut still sat in darkness.
At first, their research centered on collecting documents in Beirut, but access to some of these proved difficult or even impossible. As the pair delved deeper into the history of electric power in Lebanon, they discovered a transnational story involving businessmen, politicians, warlords, multinational companies and colonial powers. They found traces of everyday acts of survival, resistance and sabotage by workers and users of electric power. The narrative framework of "The Search for Power" was molded out of these elements.
“I’m interested in the processes of writing history both in states’ official archives and in the oral records that write history from below.”, says Tania El Khoury. With her political performance installation "The Search for Power", El Khoury invites the public to immerse themselves in archival documents and inaccessible knowledge, in a personal quest for revenge.
The search of power
- Tania El Khoury’s hybrid works blur the boundary between site-specific performances and interactive installations with political potential. She explores the relationship we have with the urban and public space through her work with Dictaphone Group in Lebanon. She focuses on oral history, urban resistance, the performance of border, and interactivity.
- Tania El Khoury returns to Onassis Stegi three years after Gardens Speak, a work presented as part of the Fast Forward Festival 3 (May 2016). This documentary performance presents the oral histories of ten ordinary people from Syria killed between 2011 and 2013, during the first wave of uprisings across their country, by means of found audio and stories told by loved ones.
- El Khoury’s historian husband, Ziad Abu-Rish, joined her in the research for The Search for Power. Abu-Rish is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Ohio University. He specializes in the Middle East and North Africa region, and his research interests focus on the political economy and cultural constructions of state formation.
