As far as my fingertips take me
Tania El Khoury with Basel Zaraa
2016
Video registration of performance at the Home/Hope exhibition, Larnaka biennale, Cyprus, 2023
A one-on-one encounter through a gallery wall between an audience member and the performer, without seeing each other. The refugee marks the audience member by drawing on their arm. The audience member listens to the song of those who have recently challenged border discrimination. The stories can be kept or washed away. Through touch and sound, this intimate encounter explores the possibility of empathy: whether we can literally ‘feel’ a refugee to understand the impact of border discrimination on people’s lives.
Our fingertips enable us to feel touch and sensations, but can also be used by authorities to track us. In today’s Europe, a refugee’s journey can only go 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 were first recorded, without any regard for their needs, desires, or plans.
Tania El Khoury is a Lebanese live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and the ethical and political potential of such encounters. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is an active collaborator. For ‘As far as my fingertips take me’, El Khoury commissioned musician and street artist Basel Zaraa, born a Palestinian refugee in Syria, to record a rap song inspired by the journey his sisters made from Damascus to Sweden, and carry out the performance.
Tania’s work has been translated into multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from national museums to small boats in the Mediterranean Sea. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the 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 a Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater & Performance and the Director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College in New York. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a co-founder of the urban research and live art collective, Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.