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If you had to pick one of your many projects as being representative of your entire output, what would it be, and why?

I would like to point to the duo of films in the Abandoned series, although as fiction films, they diverge dramatically from the documentary and archive-based films I have made for the last decade.

The first film in the series, Tripoli Cancelled (2017), premiered at the art exhibition Documenta 14, and follows a man on his daily routine of smoking, writing letters, and reading from the dark childrens classic Watership Down by Richard Adams. Is the man a prisoner or a solitary emperor? There are no guards or fences, only mannequins in Olympic Airlines uniforms, and Melina Mercouri songs. The script is loosely inspired by the experience of my father, who was trapped in the same airportHellinikonin Athens, Greece, for nine days in 1977, after losing his passport in India.

The film blurs the line between prisoner and king, by merging our epoch of migration with the post-Holocaust concepts of "spectral human" (Hannah Arendt) and "Der Muselmnner" (Primo Levi, via Giorgio Agamben). The film was shot in Hellinikons International Terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen from 1960 to 1969.Hellinikon, closed in 2001, was used recently as a temporary home for Syrian refugees, and is now the site of a luxury real estate project, as part of a privatization effort spurred by EU debt renegotiation conditions. Tripoli Cancelled can be seen as a monument to an airport, and an ambitious postwar architectural project, that in the future may not exist.

The sequel film was shot before the pandemic, but completed in 2020 during lockdown. Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) was conceived in response to a prompt given by the curators of the Yokohama Triennale, the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective. They asked us to think about modes of care, and the afterlife of caregivers. In an empty hospital in Kolkata, India, a man faces blood protocols, a subtly discriminatory office, and a vacant operating theater.

His mind is on a loop of the last months of his wifes life, when a quiet argument developed. When is the end of pharma-medical care? Whose life is it anyway? They were an estranged couple, thrown back into intimacy by an unknown illness. Even in a dreamworld of his making, the paranoia of infection is twinned with a hesitant intimacy. The film revisits themes from Tripoli Cancelledthe family unit as a locus for pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging grounds for lost souls, and the necessity of small prevarications to keep on living. In Tripoli, the boredom of daily life is punctuated by letters to an invisible wife, and endless readings of Watership Down. In Jole, a memory of final days is kept alive by the partner, and the book readings are from Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Alis stories of Europe between the two world wars.

My position is refracted through shifting borders of decolonizing Asia, which map uneasily and imperfectly onto fault lines of the diversity of America. My grandfather was a British Indian subject, who became a mathematician because of affirmative action quotas for Muslims inside the British colonial administration. My father was a Pakistani citizen, and then his portion of the country became Bangladesh. When he wanted to go to India for medical treatment in 2016, his visa was denied because of that old Pakistani identity. As I mentioned earlier, I was born in Britain, with dual British-Bangladeshi citizenship, and grew up in Libya and Bangladesh because of where my father went to work as a military doctor.

Our racial position constantly changed with movement. In Britain, we were Pakis (a slur for Asians), and in Libya, we were miskeen (Arabic for beggar). But back in Bangladesh, we are Bengali Muslims from the majority racial-linguistic group, which has oppressed and crushed indigenous Adivasi communities, driving 10 local languages and peoples almost into extinction. So I am wary of Bengali majoritarianism as well.

Later, in America, we were initially Asian American, but after 9/11 became ethnicized into American Muslims. In our contemporary moment, when migration is at record levels and ethno-nationalist politics have new value in response, passport and class privilege overlap unpredictably with racial and religious identities. These dynamics become ever more germane as U.S. colleges host an increasingly global student body.

Because of my life experiences, I gravitate toward ambiguity and gray areas of research and artmaking. I am wary of certainty and absolute lines (not to be crossed) in my work. Almost a decade ago, I recall being heavily invested in the histories of certain forms of European ultra-left violence as a form of political action. I was in Stuttgart, Germany, and asked the curators of the museum hosting my visit if they would come with me to Stammheim Prison. Of course, they knew Stammheim as the site of the tragic-violent end of the militant Baader-Meinhof core group. But their next question stayed with me: But why are you interested in a German movement? Whats the connection with Bangladesh? In my work, I try to push back against that stay-in-your-lane sense of world history.

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From the U.K. to Bangladesh, Libya, and the U.S., an Artist Crosses Boundaries in His Life and Work - Columbia University