The Fisher Center at Bard’s Fisher Center LAB and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) team up to present Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish’s lecture performance and installation, The Search for Power at CCS Bard / Hessel Museum of Art (installation: February 1–23, with live performances February 1–3 and 7–9).

On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighborhood, Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War, the artist had grown up with the understanding that the problem with electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled electricity outages across Beirut.

The two decided to research the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersection between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations to shape both. In time, they reach as far back as the introduction of electricity in Beirut before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state. In space, they collect documents across Lebanon and beyond its borders, visiting the archives of colonial powers: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What they find is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage.

The Search for Power can be experienced as a ticketed lecture performance—an intimate gathering guided by the makers sharing their research journey—or as a free access open installation, in which the audience explores the work in their own time through sound and touch.

With The Search for Power, the Fisher Center continues its holistic relationship with Tania El Khoury’s artistry and vision, which engages audiences in close encounters with narratives drawn from political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. She is a commissioned artist and guest co-curator at the Fisher Center: alongside Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester, she co-curated the 2022–23 Fisher LAB Biennial, Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food, and the 2019 Biennial, Where No Wall Remains (both of which featured commissions of El Khoury’s work). El Khoury is also a Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance at Bard, and the founding director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA). In partnership with CHRA, the Fisher Center received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support three years of live art production and touring of her work, her scholarly and artistic research, and her curatorial work at the Fisher Center and CHRA. This support continues with the current co-presentation of The Search for Power with The Invisible Dog as part of Under the Radar, through January 19, and the upcoming co-presentation of this work in Los Angeles with REDCAT, May 29 – June 8, 2025.

The Search for Power was the first time El Khoury and Abu-Rish—director of the MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts and Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College—joined their respective practices in cross-disciplinary performance. El Khoury writes in the intro to the book of The Search for Power (Tadween Publishing, 2020), “The border between our different practices (history and live art) was being crossed, blurred, and erased without having to compromise on the integrity or quality of either of these practices.”

In that intro, she described how the research—both the physical and affective dimensions of their archival digging—became the center of this work: “A key idea of the performance was to share with the audience the archival documents from the history of electricity in Lebanon. Such documents were close to impossible to access in Lebanon. So we took another route, and the process of securing archival documents led us on a journey across several countries including the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Belgium… It was an adventure that was at the same time humorous, enraging, and eye-opening. We share this journey with our audience by taking them through the documents we collected from around the world, giving them the chance to appreciate the knowledge and experience of these archival documents. Yet we also share with them the inaccessibility of this knowledge, the development of our own thinking throughout the process, and our personal motivations behind our obsession with this story.”

Ziad Abu-Rish writes in his own intro to the book, “I began this foray into The Search for Power believing it was primarily about opportunities to expand my research and spend more time with Tania. As I reflect on the experience and anticipate additional touring of the show, I have come to believe that this collaboration has been transformative in ways beyond those that were initially imagined. First, the experience of creating a research-based performance has further fueled my pre-existing interest in what academic colleagues would call public scholarship. But rather than limit my definition of this to writing for a public audience, I think it is high time those of us not in the art world take seriously performance for a public audience. Second, those of us who regularly engage in classroom teaching have important things to learn from artists such as Tania, for whom interactivity, shared vulnerability, and audience agency are critical elements in the design of a performance.”
 

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of The Search for Power take place in the Hessel Museum of Art: Saturday, February 1 at 6 pm
Sunday, February 2 at 6 pm
Monday, February 3 at 6 pm
Friday, February 7 at 6 pm
Saturday, February 8 at 6 pm
Sunday, February 9 at 6 pm

On performance days (above), exhibit hours are 11 am – 4 pm. On days when there are no performances, exhibit hours are Monday through Sunday 11 am – 5 pm.

The last admission for the open installation will be one hour before the museum’s closing.

For tickets and more information, please visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center’s box office at (845) 758-7900.
 

Funding Credits

The Search for Power was originally co-commissioned by Anti Festival and Shubbak Festival, and additionally supported by Arts Council England and brut Wien. The sound installation was commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 15.

Tania El Khoury is a 2024–2026 Fisher Center LAB artist in residence with lead support from the Mellon Foundation. Fisher Center LAB is the signature residency and commissioning program of the Fisher Center at Bard.
 

About Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory, and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.

El Khoury’s work has been translated into multiple languages and shown in 5 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK.
 

About Ziad Abu Rish

Ziad Abu-Rish is Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle East Studies at Bard College, where he also directs the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts. A scholar of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, his research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. He earned his PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles, and his MA in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Abu-Rish is coeditor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012), among other edited volumes. He is the author of several articles and chapters, including "Garbage Politics in Lebanon," "Municipal Elections in Lebanon," and "Lebanon Beyond Exceptionalism." He serves as coeditor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and codirector of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute.
 

About Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and the Hessel Museum of Art

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading institution dedicated to curatorial studies, a field exploring the conditions that inform contemporary exhibition-making and artistic practice. Through its Graduate Program, Library and Archives, and the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard serves as an incubator for interdisciplinary practices, advances new and underrepresented perspectives in contemporary art, and cultivates a student body from diverse backgrounds in a broad effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard’s dynamic and multifaceted program includes exhibitions, symposia, publications, and public events, which explore the critical potential of the practice of exhibition-making.

CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art advances experimentation and innovation in contemporary art through its dynamic exhibitions and programs. Located on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the Hessel organizes and presents group exhibitions and thematic surveys, monographic presentations, traveling exhibitions, and student-curated shows that are free and open to the public. The museum’s program draws inspiration from its unparalleled collection of contemporary art, which features the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core and comprises more than 4,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s through the present day.
 

About the Fisher Center at Bard

The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley, soon to be complemented by the Maya Lin-designed Performing Arts LAB (opening 2026). The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 165-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

The Center presents more than 200 world-class events and welcomes 50,000 visitors each year. The Fisher Center supports artists at all stages of their careers and employs more than 300 professional artists annually. The Fisher Center is a powerful catalyst for art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide. Every year, it produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines. Over the past five years, its commissioned productions have been seen in more than 100 communities around the world. During the 2018–2019 season, six Fisher Center productions toured nationally and internationally. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began its life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally in the Fisher Center’s SummerScape Festival in 2015 before transferring to New York City.