Cultural Exchange Rate, Tania El Khoury.
Presented by the Immersive Experiences Lab
Politics of/in Immersive Performance Experiences
Friday 24th October | 3:30pm — 5.00pm
Free but ticketed
Concert Hall at the University of Glasgow (Directions)
Join us for a panel presentation with Tania El Khoury, Patrick Blenkarn and Jack Lander, chaired by Eirini Nedelkopoulou.
Immersive performance invites us to step inside the story—sometimes as guests, sometimes as co-creators. But what happens when we think about the politics of these experiences? How might immersion itself be mobilised as a tool for critique, resistance, or complicity? Bringing together artists Tania El Khoury (Cultural Exchange Rate), Patrick Blenkarn (asses.masses), and Jack Lander, this panel will explore the possibilities and limits of immersive performance as a political form, consider the shifting role of audience engagement within it, and reimagine what it means to be part of a performance.
Panellist Bios
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. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessie Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. Her work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 35 countries across six continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. Tania is Distinguished Artist in Residence and Associate Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College in New York where she is also the founding director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts.
Jack Lander is an artist and researcher with multimedia practice grounded in technical and synthetic image-making, theatre and game design. Jack is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Glasgow, where his research explores the experience of remote militarised spaces in the Scottish landscape through simulation and extended reality. Working across the virtual and the actual, he is particularly interested in how the indexical qualities of scanned landscapes alter sensorial affect within immersive digital spaces. Jack was a founding member of the anarchic art and performance collective 85A and worked as an artist and designer with the experimental theatre company Untitled Projects. His work has been exhibited at The Tate Modern, The Dublin Science Centre, The ICA London, and The Kunstmuseum Bonn, working alongside organisations including Warp Records, Editions Mego, Scottish Dance Theatre, Void Nomadic Gallery, Fusion Kulturcosmos, and Sonar Barcelona. Jack is also a laser designer and a rave enthusiast, having worked on shows for Aphex Twin, Florian Hecker, Sega Bodega, Lorenzo Senni, and The Modern Institute.
Patrick Blenkarn is an artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. Often engaging with the politics of participation and interactivity, his recent works feature sustained investigations into the subjects of language, labour, democracy, and the art economy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books. His work has been featured in film festivals, galleries, and performance festivals across Canada, and recently in Argentina, Mexico, Germany, and the Arctic. He is the Producer for The Elbow Theatre in Vancouver and one half of Guilty by Association. Patrick has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King's College and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from Simon Fraser University.
David Mesiha (he/him) is a Toronto & Vancouver based award winning Composer | Sound Designer | Mixed media Artist. He is known for his music composition and multimedia installations alike. David's artistic practice has often seen him take on a collaborative role in the total conception, co-creation and realization of work with particular sensitivity to dramaturgy as well as immersive audio-visual design. David’s work has received critical acclaim across multiple mediums, including theatre, film, and video games. His immersive works include Same Difference, Swim, and Foreign Radical, which won a prestigious Fringe First Award at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. David is co-artistic director of Theatre Conspiracy in Vancouver.
Workshop
Don’t miss Democracy, Performance, and Immersive Practices: Workshop with Patrick Blenkarn and David Mesiha, taking place before the panel.