A scanned receipt from Syrian borders when fleeing war and leaving Syria. Here you can see the focus on the blue hue found in the stamps and signatures.
Dictatorship Blue, 2023-ongoing
Dictatorship Blue is a body of work centered on a pigment I developed in 2023 by sampling the blue found in stamps and signatures on documents gathered throughout my smuggling and migration journey from Syria to Sweden through Turkey and Europe. The project examines how bureaucracy governs movement, access, and survival, especially at borders. By turning these administrative marks into pigment, the work traces how state power leaves visual and material residue on memory and on the lives of those it regulates.
The project began with my own legal and border documents and grew into a wider investigation of bureaucracy as a visual and political system. The blue drawn from official stamps and signatures became a way to examine how power operates through paperwork, regulation, and documentation. What appears neutral or administrative is revealed instead as a mechanism of control.
Although the project begins with documents issued under the Assad regime, it extends beyond the Syrian context. It follows how bureaucratic systems reappear across borders and institutions, shaping who can move, who can stay, and who is denied access to safety. In this way, the work reflects on bureaucracy not only as a national structure, but as a wider technology of exclusion.
The project also considers the fragility of documents themselves. Papers that appear stable and authoritative can fade, deteriorate, and lose force over time, even as lives are made to depend on them. In works such as 25 Shades Toward Disappearance, I use the fading of pigment to think through the instability of records and the uncertain conditions they produce.
By connecting colour, paper, and memory, Dictatorship Blue examines how bureaucracy leaves traces that are both material and psychological, turning ink, stamps, and signatures into a language of power, survival, and disappearance.
