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As Far As My Fingertips Take Me

Tania El Khoury and Basel Zaraa

A collaboration between live artist Tania El Khoury and musician and street artist Basel Zaraa.

Photo by Tania El Khoury

As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is an encounter through a gallery wall between an audience member and a refugee. Their arms touch without seeing each other. The refugee will mark the audience by drawing on their arm. The audience will listen to those who have recently challenged border discrimination. The marking can be kept or washed away.

Tania El Khoury commissioned musician and street artist Basel 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 and sound, this intimate encounter explores empathy and whether we need to literally “feel” a refugee in order to understand the effect of border discrimination on peoples’ lives.

Our fingertips facilitate touch and sensations, 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. The Dublin Regulation mandated a fingerprinting database across Europe for all refugees and migrants. The regulation often means that a refugee is sent back to where their fingertips where first recorded, without any regard to their needs, desires, or plans.

“His tale doesn’t just touch me in a fleeting way – as the many stories and images reported in the newspapers do – it goes further. It marks me.”

The Guardian

This event is part of Prismatic Arts Festival at Treaty Space Gallery, in partnership with NSCAD University.

One-on-one performance by Tania El Khoury
Performed by Basel Zaraa
Song by Basel Zaraa (vocals, bass and keyboard), with Emily Churchill Zaraa (vocals), Pete Churchill (music production) and Katie Stevens (flute and clarinet)
Commissioned by “On the Move” LIFT 2016 in partnership with Royal Court Theatre, London.

  • The space is wheelchair accessible
  • This event is partially accessible to deaf people
  • This event is partially accessible to blind and visually impaired people
  • Content warning: physical contact
  • To discuss specific access requirements please write to info@orlandofestival.it

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 the artist 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 centred around the recreation of a destroyed family home, which received the ZKB Audience Award in 2023. 

Zaraa also collaborated with the artist 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.

Date and time

28 September – 2 October 2026

Booking

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Venue

Treaty Space Gallery
Halifax
Canada

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