This ongoing body of work began in 2015 and continues to unfold through my repeated encounters with visa applications, embassy processes, and airport security checks.
— an evolving archive shaped as much by waiting as by movement.
Blending satire with tenderness, the work looks at how mobility is unevenly distributed. Airports like to present themselves as neutral, efficient spaces, but the experience of moving through them often suggests otherwise. Over time, I’ve become familiar with a particular rhythm: the second look, the pause, the “random” selection that rarely feels entirely random.
As Hannah Arendt points out, the idea of “the right to have rights” is foundational, yet not universally accessible. In practice, it often comes down to the passport one carries. Some passports move quickly. Others, as Tariq Ali has suggested in his critique of borders and power, tend to travel more cautiously—stopped, examined, and occasionally set aside.
I work within this space of uneven movement, where identity is read before it is spoken. Skin, accent, and documentation often arrive ahead of me. In these moments, I sometimes feel less like a passenger and more like a small administrative exercise.
There is a quiet familiarity to the process that begins to feel almost rehearsed—something not far from the bureaucratic logic of Franz Kafka, where the system proceeds with confidence, even when its reasoning remains unclear. At the same time, it echoes Edward Said’s writing on how difference is produced and managed through observation. As Salman Rushdie writes, “the past is a foreign country.” Increasingly, it feels as though the present can be one too—depending on where you are standing, and which document you are holding.
“The experience of having brown skin, a beard, and a South Asian English accent is negotiated at every gate of entry into the global West. These encounters form the basis of this project.
It is through this constant ‘random check’ that I have come to understand how easily identity can be read as risk.”
The work extends beyond images. It exists in visa portals, embassy correspondence, and the slow passage of time between application and response. Recent attempts to secure a visa through the German embassy for a fellowship, along with earlier delays around a museum exhibition in Vienna, are not interruptions—they are part of the material.
The title, Joy of Being Detained, sits somewhere between sincerity and irony. The “joy” is not quite celebration, but not entirely sarcasm either. It is a small, deliberate shift in tone,
a way of holding space for humor within a system that rarely offers it.
