Artist Statement/ Biography

Tania works with sculpture, video, and installation to embody and assemble evidence of her fragmented origin story. Drawing on Lebanese rituals, such as life readings with coffee grinds, soap making, and baking bread, she investigates the loss of information in the act of translation and passing down knowledge within a diaspora. As she works to recreate and relearn the authentic objects and rituals, the resulting “failures” become the work and speak to attempts to recreate home within displacement. In the coffee reading ritual, the cup represents a portal between different histories and locations. Soap making signifies an alchemical process she connects to her experience of merging familial knowledge and new environments. Baking bread speaks to the embodied knowledge transferred generationally.

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Tania Khouri (b. 1990, Oklahoma City, Ok.) is a multimedia artist examining embodied rituals and oral histories. Following familial lineages as a form of reclamation and tracking the movement of information, her work blends photography, video, sculpture, and installation to navigate the liminality of cultural hybridity. Khouri holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design at The New School and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Oklahoma. She was a resident of The Hollows Art Residency in Brooklyn, New York, has been published in Photographer's Forum, Art&Education, TransCultural Exchange's Hello World, and Galerie Magazine online.