The Moment I Entered The Lebanese Borders From Syria #1, 2024
35 x 28 cm
Watercolors and Dictatorship Blue on paper and canvas

These paintings are part of an ongoing project that explores bureaucratic violence, memory, and migration. It is rendered in hyperrealistic detail using watercolors and a custom-made pigment I developed, which I have named Dictatorship Blue. The color was formulated by sampling the blue ink tones found in stamps and signatures on official documents I collected during my smuggling journey from Syria to Sweden as a war refugee.

These paintings are hand-drawn, hyperrealistic remakes of an actual receipt I received in 2015 when I crossed the Syrian–Lebanese border, marking the beginning of my escape route toward Europe. By reproducing this seemingly banal yet politically charged document, the work examines how administrative paperwork is weaponized to regulate movement and how such fragments become both evidence of survival and relics of state control.

As a queer person fleeing war, these crossings involved more than just physical movement. To survive, I had to navigate heteronormative expectations and conceal aspects of my identity, performing a straight-passing appearance to protect myself from both state and interpersonal homophobia. The documentation depicted in the work represents not only state power, but also the invisible negotiations of safety, gender, and sexuality that many queer refugees are forced to undertake. The use of Dictatorship Blue underscores both the psychological weight of bureaucratic markings and the emotional labor of erasure and self-editing imposed by systemic violence.

The title of the work refers to a specific moment in time, yet it does not contain the full experience. Lebanon here is not framed as the primary site of hardship, but as the entry point into a broader series of crossings, across national borders, institutional thresholds, and social expectations. It marks the first of many encounters with systems of surveillance, suspicion, and selective recognition.