Cultural Exchange Rate
Aula Maxima, University of Galway
★★★★☆
It’s not a catchy or particularly enticing title, but Tania El Khoury’s live installation visiting the festival is charming and unusual and hooks you into its world.
In the dimmish light of the Aula Maxima there is a wall of safety-deposit-style boxes, like a collection of locked cabinets of curiosity, each telling an aspect of the story or containing a mystery.
Each visitor gets a giant bunch of keys and follows an individual journey through 10 numbered boxes, opening each with one of the keys. They are variously large, small, high, low; you stick your head through black curtains into a series of nuggets from the Lebanese artist’s story. Each box is scented and contains props or documents, a recording or crackly video. You spend some minutes with each and move on; the entire experience lasts less than an hour.
These story nuggets are part of a larger story of El Khoury’s family, originally from villages on the Lebanon-Syria border. We learn about her great-grandparents who emigrated to Mexico, returning separately years later; El Khoury’s efforts to find her great-grandfather’s records in Mexico; her grandmother who survived wars and migration; discovering lost relatives in Mexico City; the family’s attempt to secure dual citizenship; her father’s obsession with collecting worthless old Lebanese currency, which was the impetus for this project exploring identity.
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Cultural Exchange Rate review: Intriguing, moving and far more than the sum of its parts
It looks forward, too: El Khoury’s baby daughter, trapped without a nationality, half-Palestinian and half-Lebanese but officially neither because of Palestine’s lack of statehood and Lebanon’s ferociously patriarchal system.
This is personal, one family’s individual path and mysteries and quirks, but also one cog in a world of stories. A lovely festival experience, carefully and thoughtfully made. Intriguing and moving, it builds an intimate picture that is far more than the sum of its parts.
Cultural Exchange Rate runs several times daily, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Sunday, July 28th
