What Will We Do Without Exile? by Basel Zaraa is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that creates a lush world within a refugee tent, inviting audiences to imagine life beyond occupation.
It is one of our four public art commissions for Moomin 80 during Refugee Week.
Visit Bradford 2025 Uk City of Culture for full visit details including opening times.
What Will We Do Without Exile
By Basel Zaraa
In collaboration with: Emily Churchill Zaraa
Sound artist: Pete Churchill
Newspaper Illustrator and Designer: Charlotte Bailey
Featuring the voice of Sahar Qawasmi
With thanks to all the interview participants.
While generations of Palestinian bodies have been forced into tents, their imaginations have never stopped reaching for liberation. What Will We Do Without Exile? pays tribute to imagination as resistance, as it celebrates the natural and cultural richness of Palestine, past, present and future. Through sight, touch, sound and stories, audience members are transported to a reality where the land and its people are finally free.
What Will We Do Without Exile? honours the struggle and sacrifice of colonised people, and imagines a world where they have not only won their liberation, but where their resilience and ingenuity are recognised as invaluable examples for humanity in crisis.
Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian artist whose work uses the senses to bring audiences closer to experiences of exile and war, and who creates art in order to face, express and understand the trauma that his community lives with. 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 life beyond occupation and war.
Since 2022 he has also been touring ‘Dear Laila’, an intimate, a one-person-at-a-time installation centred around the recreation of a destroyed family home, which received the ZKB Audience Award 2023. His previous work includes ‘As Far As My Fingertips Take Me’, a collaboration with Tania El Khoury, which was awarded Outstanding Production at the Bessie Awards in 2019. His work has been shown at over 50 venues and festivals across five continents.
What Will We Do Without Exile? is co-commissioned and co-produced with Counterpoints Arts and Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture and made possible by Moomin Characters Ltd as part of the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the first Moomins book.
