This is Not Me

This is Not Me
1,000 found unaltered photo fragments, archival plastic sleeves
2005 - ongoing




Over the last few years, the artist team Lin + Lam have collected hundreds of abandoned ID card photo remainders. Together these photographs represent to them a collectivity of 'non-identities': the people amongst us who are caught between visibility and invisibility. At once sad and comic, the faceless testify to the violence that severs individual selves into anonymous categories, such as "migrant," "undocumented," "alien," "refugee," "stateless."
According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the term "stateless person" refers to one who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. The Webopedia Computer Dictionary defines "stateless" as "having no information about what occurred previously." A stateless server, such as the World Wide Web, treats each request as an independent transaction without requiring any context or memory.
This is Not Me points to negation--as it exists in ourselves and at the hands of the bureaucratic state apparatus. Such negation arises at the very moment of a double recognition--self-recognition and recognition of the erasure of other bodies in the socio-political landscape.
http://www.linpluslam.com/this.htm

Teatro Indocumentado

After the largest immigration raid in history at a meat-packing plant in Iowa last year, several undocumented workers await deportation. While in limbo these men are reenacting their stories on stage.

http://www.studio360.org/go.py?r=http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2009/09/25

This is a 10' x 20' mural about diversity in Los Angeles that I have been commissioned to create for LAANE - a Los Angeles non profit headed by former immigration attorney Madeline Janis

Satisfied customer Peter Byck sports a Todd Becraft "t."

A father of three United States citizen children awaits an interview at U.S.C.I.S. Family unity is a major issue in the immigration debate in the United States.

North Korean Asylum

In 2006, I worked with the Human Rights Project and attorney Judith Wood, to obtain the first grant of political asylum under the North Korean Human Rights Act. These cases are difficult because South Korea claims North Koreans as citizens and as a result the U.S. Immigration Court considers these refugees as "firmly resettled" in a third country - a bar to asylum in the United States.