Somewhere between memoir and manifesto, you’ll find me. I offer myself as a case study of becoming: the body, once non-sited, reclaimed; the body, once commodified, now created in its own image; the turning of my flesh vessel into an organic sculpture returning to what we are and what we always have been, nature. Operating at the intersection of poetry, academic essays, sculpture, sound, performance, and multi-screen installation, my practice uses the vulnerable alchemization of my own history to dismantle the structures that have contained me.

Through Relational Aesthetics and Institutional Critique, I investigate the body in relation to placehood and value. I treat the gallery, text, and third spaces as sites for identity excavation, transforming systemic critiques into live, social practice. My work explores meaning-making, sense of self, and the profound relationality of our co-created realities, challenging the artificial boundaries and labels ascribed to us by the institutions we inhabit.

Ultimately, my practice is a refusal of worth and forced separations. My work is the reclamation of value and the collective.

this a case study of becoming.

Lue “LIKETHEHIGHWAY” Khoury (2002) is a gender-fluid Palestinian-Greek American conceptual artist, writer, and poet whose practice is deeply interdisciplinary. Refusing the confinement of a single medium, Khoury fluidly moves between poetry, sound, high-endurance performance, installation, painting, sculpture, and social practice within the public space. For Khoury, medium functions not as a restriction, but as an exploratory tool deployed precisely to investigate and illustrate specific emotional urgencies and complex concepts. Treating life as source material to navigate "identity alchemy," they investigate bodily value, self-actualization, and freedom. At 19, they developed Living Life as an Experiment in Art, a foundational practice designed to reclaim what they coin "commbodity"—the ways dominant social forces ascribe value to bodies.

Through this expansive visual and performative toolkit—often utilizing custom-built structural apparatuses and grueling stunt training—Khoury investigates the profound relationship between the body and placehood. Their work navigates the fragmentation of diaspora and the weights of collective grief, transforming shared trauma into a site of resistance and somatic memory. By exposing the body to suspension and calculated risk, Khoury transforms shared vulnerabilities into a space for collective reclamation and transcendent healing, guiding audiences past societal constraints toward radical liberation.

Highlighting their international recognition, Khoury was invited to present at Dread Scott’s All African Peoples Consulate during the 2024 Venice Biennale. Their widely recognized writings are published in Expat Press and ANMLY #42, among others. Featured in Ada Søby’s forthcoming documentary The Blank Canvas, Khoury is the recipient of the 2023 Holmes Performing Arts Fund Grant for Reject My Warmth and earned Pitzer College’s Student Research Award with double Honors for their thesis On Commbodity. They have exhibited and performed at institutions globally, ranging from SADE Gallery to the steps of the Guggenheim.