pain papers
2019, installation: MA35 and Austrian Foreign Affairs visa application rejections, digitally reworked and anonymized, DIN A4. Barbed wire, metal rope, 400cm
2022, book chapter: Amidst the Strings of Necropolicies: Capital, Labour and Migration in Post-ideological Era. In “Re-Activating Critical Thinking in the Midst of Necropolitical Realities: For Radical Change”, edited by Marina Gržinić, and Jovita Pristovšek, 100-120. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK
Please contact if you want to read the book chapter.
a plateau of pain
suddenly
explodes inside me
in silent,
delivered by
a piece of paper.
the hand that signed,
my hand that held.
pain papers is about the power of immigration offices, whose rejection letters cause painful -even traumatic- experience for the applicants, who come to Austria for better residence, study or work opportunities. Whilst these offices exist with the purpose of covering the bureaucratic needs of people, one-fifth of Vienna’s inhabitants are undergoing unfair and exhausting procedures every year. A document, - a piece of paper - that states a person’s visa or residency permit is rejected, that paper’s existence becomes the source of psychological torture and trauma for the person. I collected a large amount of declined visa application documents from migrants residing/resided in Vienna.
The essay analyses migration and diasporic realities through a marxist and decolonial reading.
I call these documents pain papers, because they cause a juridical pain that one can only acquiesce.