This Is Not Me

2005
mixed media installation; 1,000 found photo fragments and archival plastic sleeve

For several years, Lin + Lam have collected hundreds of abandoned ID card photo remainders from a police station in Taipei, Taiwan. 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.