Our fingertips facilitate touch and sensation but are also used by authorities to track many of us. In today’s Europe, a refugee’s journey can be set as far as their fingertips take them. Determined by the Dublin Regulation, which mandated a fingerprinting database for all refugees and migrants across Europe, refugees may be sent back to where their fingertips were first recorded, without any regard to their needs, desires, or plans.

As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is an intimate one-to-one encounter through a gallery wall between an audience member and a refugee. Without seeing each other, their arms touch. While the audience member listens to stories of those who have recently challenged border discrimination, the refugee marks the stories on the audience member’s arm by drawing. After the encounter, the drawings can be kept or washed off.

The work is created by artist Tania El Khoury and performed by musician and artist Basel Zaraa. Khoury commissioned Zaraa, who was born a Palestinian refugee in Syria, to record a rap song inspired by the journey his sisters made from Damascus to Sweden. Through touch, sound, and listening, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me explores empathy and asks whether we need to literally feel a refugee in order to understand the effect of border discrimination on peoples’ lives.

Tania El Khoury is a live artist who creates interactive installations and performances that generate knowledge and alternative narratives, while reflecting on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her practice is activated through tactile, auditory, and visual materials collected and curated by herself and her collaborators, and ultimately transformed through audience interaction. Her work has been translated to multiple languages and shown across six continents in spaces ranging from national museums to the Mediterranean Sea. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 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.
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.

Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian multidisciplinary artist whose work uses the senses to bring audiences closer to experiences of exile and war, and creates spaces for imagination as an act of resistance. Zaraa makes art in order to face, express, and understand the trauma that his community lives with, exploring themes of borders, identity, and belonging. His current installation, What Will We Do Without Exile? is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that creates a lush world within a refugee tent, inviting audiences to imagine liberation, and life beyond occupation and war. Since 2022 he has also been touring Dear Laila, an intimate, one-person-at-a-time installation centered around the recreation of a destroyed family home, which received the ZKB Audience Award in 2023. Zaraa also collaborated with Tania El Khoury on As Far As Isolation Goes, which explores the physical and emotional isolation of refugees, using the body as a canvas.
His work has been shown at over 60 venues and festivals across the world, in locations ranging from national galleries to apartments, abandoned buildings to outdoor spaces.