Authors

model photographer supervisor concept work

Hussein Shabeeb, Duraid Abbas Ghaieb, Hayder Helo &
Monika Borys

 Artistic statement

I live in a semi-hundred shapes, all of them are I.

Iraqi poet

With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings, somos todos un paíz. Love swells in your body and shoots out of your heart chakra, linking you to everyone/everything – the aboriginals in Australia, the crows in the forest, the vast Pacific Ocean. You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label. Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Passport photo

Everything begins from a snapshot. You sit motionless with your eyes open. As you are supposed to look natural in 34×45 mm size, you try not to grin and not to frown. From now on, blinded by the flash of a camera, you become visible and easy to spy. Your passport photo finds its place in a visual archive of identities. However, does your photo really belong to you? The human being is the only organism who has created an image of himself/herself. The image which allows him/her to pass, travel and exist.

I did not choose the date of my birth, neither the place nor the culture from which I came. I did not choose my parents or the time they made love. You also did not choose your gender, origin, social class. What is the probability I was born as you? Is there a chance that my image could be in your passport? Would you accept my passport photo?

It is not surprising to say today that photography as a practice is entangled in the networks of power. The most meaningful example that springs to mind is a mug shot used by police to identify criminals. Nonetheless, it is not the only instance when photography is used as an identification tool. A particular kind of picture used to recognize human identity is in our ID documents. A passport photo controls its object unscrupulously. The photo with precisely specified parameters intends to provide specific knowledge of its holder. The passport aspires to function as a „material version‟ of identity. Moreover, from its first versions to a biometrical variant, the passport requires from us more and more personal information. It is no exaggeration to say that the biometric passport system controls our bodies.

The iPass project is our response to the modern world-system where our identities are seen as unchangeable, finished, formed and which are supposed to be controlled with race, class, gender, religion, age, origin and culture labels. We present an infinite collection of passport photos which belong to one person. The difference being we did not conform to the restrictive rules for biometric passport photos. We have crossed these rules consciously. The artistic strategy used in the iPass is our gesture of resistance. Capturing the modern idea of a passport, we want to create space of autonomy where we are able to disturb and renegotiate blind categories which shape our lifes. The iPass shows that the human is not a slave to one nationality, because we believe that there is something beyond nationality and culture, beyond class, gender and race. If we want to find a freedom and live in a world where all people are able to express themselves, we have to look beyond these rigid categories. We are more than our passports.

Juggling identities

A man whose biography we do not know takes on many different faces. Each character he plays out is different from the others. Every detail of the picture is important to us, each element of the costume is recreated very precisely. Playing with reality, we take care that each character presented is as probable as possible. Looking at photos in a sequence, spectators will try to identify the people. Some figures can be identified at a first glance. Some look strikingly like Jesus Christ, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, Gandhi, Jasir Arafat. Others are not so easy to recognize. The uncertainty of a disorientation leads our imaginations astray. Who is this man/woman? Where was he/she born? Viewers will likely try to discern nationality, social class and profession of the characters. There is a Jew, a black man, a farmer, an Orthodox priest, a soldier, a woman in a burqa. The perception of the exhibition is based on the viewer‟s repetition of attempting to identify traits. Referring to social imagery and knowledge, we play with the spectator‟s imagination.

iPass is work in progress. We have been working on it for two years and have already captured around sixty characters. By multiplexing identities we want to undermine the power of the passport and call into question the belief that the place where we were born determines our life. Our place of birth is an accident. The protagonist of the iPass goes beyond the self repeatedly. Having a chance to become over and over again, we exceed our biography and go beyond the specific genealogy; rid of who one is, one can become someone else. Emphasizing the fact that identity is always in flux – under construction – we want to convince the audience to free their

imagination from colonizing stereotypes. We believe that by looking beyond rigid conventions we are able to see more and further.

By insisting on the randomness of birth, we undermine nationality as a category which could completely determine our lives. If culture is a construct, like a wardrobe of costumes, we can consider all humans as – what Giorgio Agamben reminds us in We Refugees – pure human. Treating class, gender and cultural labels as a costume makes it possible to undermine the overwhelming impression of their naturalness and neutrality.

Furthermore, we want to draw attention to how cultural differences are produced in the world which is historically, socially and spatially linked. The difference is our starting point, but not the final result. The idea of multiculturalism treats differences as a tool to mark those who are “different” because of their language, culture or color. Such a way of thinking of the globalized world divides society and separates us from each other. As a consequence, difference and diversity are losing their emancipatory potential. With our project we want to understand what social differences mean today, how to be conscious of the existence of differences and how to surpass them at the same time.

Border/ difference/ inequality

By looking at the following passport photographs we can imagine what it means to their owners at a border crossing. People will experience the same border crossing differently. A well-off man from western Europe, a woman from the Middle East, a poor farmer from Pakistan – each cross borders in different ways. National borders have a dual character. They are not only an administrative line, but also a source of social privileges and exclusions. The experience of crossing borders is determined by many factors. While for some it is fast and goes almost unnoticed, for others it can be a difficult, long and sometimes dangerous process. Probably for some characters appearing in the iPass crossing a particular border may not have been possible at all. The border is a place of exclusion. To realize how strong social inequalities are, we can try to imagine how our situation would change, were we to cross a border with a passport borrowed from one of the iPass characters.

From this perspective, crossing borders is not a neutral process, it is based on the recognition of our status; it is the moment when social hierarchy is constituted. The border is a place, where not only cultural differences become more visible, but social inequalities based on those differences are reproduced.

Future

I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I’m obliged to belong. I have no tradition. I’m free. I have only the future. Richard Wright

Paradoxically, the utopian idea when one body could take on various identities is not about the multicultural conclusion “we all are different”. Such ways of thinking are blind to the factors that shape our lives. The iPass project rather reveals tensions between the individual and universal; it highlights relations between particular biographies and history and it creates the dialectic of macro- and microcosms. We would like to encourage our viewers to look at people without categories, which are – in the modern nation-state ruled by passports – dangerously naturalized. In this project we try to go beyond labels.

Rather than stabilizing identity, the iPass project is based on the idea of disidentification. In this sense our protagonist is queer. We want to impeach racial, gender, class categories, but without forgetting about the differences that exist between us. We believe all social hierarchies and inequalities – based on the recognition of differences and the “we-others” binary logic – should be questioned.

The artistic strategy of a multiplication of identities creates the conditions of the possibility to think about a figure, who has his/her own culture and surpasses it, simultaneously. As a consequence, the consistency and permanence of culture is suspended. We believe that our project encourages a change in perception. We do not agree with the “clash of civilizations” narrations which divide modern society and put barricades between us. Responding to the modern conditions of life, where we live in a “general condition of homelessness” as Edward Said has told, we have to imagine a new possible world, where we can all live together.