land of the      , home of the          .

2025

Laser etched cardboard

land of the     , home of the      . is a series of five etched cardboard panels based on family photographs taken in July 2002—immediately after our arrival in the United States, and in the shadow of a post-9/11 America. Laser-etched onto cardboard—a material as impermanent, devalued, and vulnerable as the immigrant experience—the images depict my family standing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. The Statue of Liberty, facing away from us, looms dark and distant. Some images in the installation remain intact, while in others, my figure is removed—marking the instability of belonging, and the fragmented nature of memory and identity during a time of heightened national suspicion.

The title, “land of the     , home of the      .” pulled from the national anthem, leaves its meaning intentionally unfinished. It becomes a fill-in-the-blank prompt, asking viewers to consider who is included in this nation's ideals, and who is left out. Who is this land really for? Who feels at home here?  This work embodies a quiet grief—the distance between the American Dream and lived reality. My mother’s visible hijab, the monument’s turned back, and the cardboards burned edges converge to speak to a country that promises sanctuary but responds with suspicion. 

It is both an archival gesture and an act of resistance—a reflection on memory, inheritance, and the weight of realizing that the freedoms promised were never meant for everyone.

Installed upright in a linear formation, the panels evoke both a row of national flags and the visual language of museum exhibitions—gesturing toward institutions that often flatten cultural identities into artifacts while failing to represent living communities. The piece exists in the tension between patriotic pageantry and erasure, preservation and absence.

While the installation draws from formal display structures, it also imagines itself beyond the institution—on the street, on a fence, or suspended in spaces that interrupt the everyday. It is personal, political, and unafraid to ask who gets to belong.