Sejjaħ lil Malta
Sejjaħ lil Malta is a performance that happens on two shorelines.
Tania El Khoury invites the audience to take a journey on a Maltese water taxi boat from Valletta to Senglea, and to listen to sea shells that were picked up from the Tunisian coastal city of Sousse. Sejjaħ lil Malta explores our changing perception of the Mediterranean Sea, a fluctuating space of multiple borders, a leisure destination for some, and a death trap to many of those seeking refuge. The water taxis themselves tell a local story of Malta’s internal borders as a result of the privatisation of the seashore.
The performance is the sound of the relationship of Malta and Tunisia and the border in between: The Mediterranean Sea.
14, 15, 16, June 2024
Site-specific performance by Tania El Khoury, created in 2018 commissioned by Dal-Baħar Madwarha, curated by Maren Richter
Performance: Chakib Zidi and Mohamed Ali “Dali” Agrebi
Narrator and sound designer: Yasmin Kuymizakis
Singers: Mouheddine Chalchoule (Huita) and Yasmin Kuymizakis
Performed in 2024, within the project Figure It Out: The Art of Living Through System Failure
Proudly part of Refugee Week Malta 2024
Tania El Khoury Tania El Khoury is a live artist who creates interactive 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 materials collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work engages questions of displacement, border systems, privatization, and the politics of space in how they are shaped through nation building projects and colonial legacies.
El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from national museums to fisherman boats in the Mediterranean Sea. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessie 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.
Refugee Week Malta is the local version of the largest global arts and cultural festival that celebrates the creativity, contributions and resilience of people seeking sanctuary.
This project is co-funded by the European Union, and by the NGO Co-financing Scheme of the Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector.
