The Shadow of the Invisible
(2022)
In this project, I delve into the space where visibility collapses and lives become data. The Shadow of the Invisible reflects on how the human aspect of forced migration dissolves into abstract statistics - how bodies, names, and memories become unreadable silhouettes.
I reworked found photographs of displaced people into negative blue-toned images, inspired by X-ray scans used at militarized border checkpoints. These spectral figures - stripped of identity, language, race, and religion - appear as anonymous shadows. Printed on a 10-meter-long strip of fabric, they stretch side by side like endless data rows. At one end of the fabric lies a rolled bundle, symbolizing potential futures - displacements not yet visible, journeys not yet taken.
In this project, I do not seek to restore individual identities, but to emphasize their systemic disappearance. I work with shadows and silhouettes, not as absence, but as the last traces of presence. These ghostly bodies - detected by machines but denied political and human recognition - hover between presence and loss, between memory and oblivion.
In a time of postmodern border governance, where surveillance technologies render every contour of the body hyper-visible, the migrant becomes a “bare life” - a form recorded only biologically, yet stripped of voice, dignity, and political belonging. This work explores the paradox of this visibility: where being seen does not equate to being acknowledged.
The Shadow of the Invisible is both a mourning and a resistance - an aesthetic of the disappeared, the excluded, the nearly erased.