Bryn Mawr College, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture and Slought presented Reflections on Syria, a conversation about the human cost of conflict, and the role of art in catalyzing urgency, on Saturday, September 8, 2018 from 2-4pm.
Organized to coincide with ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury in the 2018 Fringe Festival, this free event with guest speakers, music and Syrian light fare featuring political science professor Samer Abboud, refugee resettlement worker Mohammed Al-Juboori, live artist Tania El Khoury and collaborator Kinana Issa, and musicians Hafez Kotain and Jay Fluellen, with Hazami Sayed as moderator.
The locales represented in Tania El Khoury’s work—gardens in Syria where the bodies of political activists are buried, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon (El Khoury’s home country) where the inhabitants have been “temporarily” hosted for generations, camps in Munich, and many border zones—are the kind of distant places Americans have heard about often enough in the news that we may have become numb to the realities of life in such circumstances. In her work, El Khoury conspires with the audience, bringing us into intimate experiences that echo, in fragments, the sound, the look, the feel, of real life events that her work embodies. Whether focusing on the persecution of activists responding to oppression or the stories of refugees facing challenges of flight or resettlement, each work invites the audience to make choices in interacting with our world.
Major support for ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury has been provided to Bryn Mawr College by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and is presented in association with FringeArts.
