This paper explores the status of the refugee in the context of Agamben´s Homo “sacer” (1998). People who fled their countries of origin and managed to reach Europe are reduced to a state of bare life. Excluded from legal rights and without legal status, they struggle to regain their political life. As Agamben stated, this bare life status is controlled and secured by the “state of exception”, as mandated by the European Union. Within this context, this paper will analyse artistic projects as an empowering force in the refugee’s struggle for legal status. Artistic interventions have a great power to interfere with the ready-made narratives, distorted by the socio-political sphere, to tell the stories of the “Other”, to convince that their life is “grievable” (Butler, 2009). The question remains: Is a grievable life translatable? Translation is an important part of every artistic project which deals with refugees. Moreover, the artistic intervention becomes a translation itself. This leads to the following questions: How does the artistic work as a translation function in the target language audience and who is the audience? What is the message that is being translated and how is it understood? In order to answer these questions, the concept of Europe will be questioned from different points of view, both as a translational, multilingual space, and a space of power relations and socio-economical conflicts. By analysing artistic interventions as translations, and by examining their function, these works of art will be investigated as counter-narratives against the heavily mediated image of the refugee.