Between Us and the Borders
Foad SM
When I was a child, my mother would spread a striped blanket over the carpet to keep it clean. For my brother and me, that blanket became an endless road where we drove our toy cars. Its long stripes were highways connecting one end of the blanket to the other. Perhaps that was my first memory of borders—a place where we moved between the lines while respecting them.
Borders are imaginary spaces created to organize and control societies: lines that cannot be seen yet crossing them becomes either a value or an anti-value within a culture. Governments often portray the world beyond their borders as chaotic or unstable, suggesting that everything inside is safe and valuable while what lies outside is dangerous or unfamiliar.
This exhibition, Between Us and the Borders, presents a selection of forty documentary photographs drawn from different series I created across various places and times. Through these images, I aim to reveal shared human moments—small interactions between people, places, and nature that can be recognized anywhere. A photograph taken in Chinatown in Hawaii might feel familiar to someone who has never been there, just as a natural landscape in Kurdistan, Iran could resemble Texas or another place connected to the viewer’s memory. Our relationship to photographs is shaped by memory.
A photographer remembers moments not necessarily as they were, but as they wish to remember them. The decision of when to capture an image and how to frame it is guided by personal experience. What connects the photographer and the viewer is this shared space of memory—those small, recognizable moments that belong to all of us. In that sense, our real borders are not geographic; they are the shared experiences that bring us closer to one another.
The idea of borders is also deeply personal to me. And it reminds me of two quotes from two movie lines that they have followed me through different periods of my life—one before immigrating from Madagascar and another from The Wizard of Oz, which I saw before immigrating but understood only afterward. When I was younger, I repeated the line, “You ever thought there might be more to life than steak?” Later, after immigrating, it became, “There’s no place like home.”
Between those two thoughts lies a contrast: between ambition and regret, between solitude and longing. Every thought you have creates its own reality. When Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, and they do that kind of dance at the crossroads, they think about going in all those directions, but they end up going in only one direction. All the other directions—just because they thought about them—become separate realities.
We cannot change those borders and restrictions. We simply go in one direction and live the rest of our lives there. I am trapped—we are trapped—in one reality, a sort of restriction. Somewhere along the way, I began to realize that the idea of the dreamland (the American Dream) is not tied to a specific place. It could exist anywhere; it could be at those junctions, if people truly understand the meaning of peace.
I imagine the Earth as that same striped blanket from my childhood, with a long road connecting one side to the other. Traveling across the world—without mental borders—is a beautiful possibility.
Between Us and the Borders combines my documentary photography from recent years with an interactive installation that invites participation. While the photographs encourage quiet contemplation, the installation transforms the gallery into a shared space for empathy, dialogue, and play. Together, they explore our shared humanity across cultures and question the invisible lines that separate us.
March 27 – April 18, 2026 Artspace Gallery Richmond VA
Artist Talk March 28 - 2026
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artspacegallery.org
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Richmond, VA 23225
804-232-6464 (office)