Cultural Exchange Rate review: Intriguing, moving and far more than the sum of its parts

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.