Threshold

Threshold (2025) explores identity, displacement, and belonging through photography and objects. Exploring memory, loss of home, and denied citizenship, the work examines how identity persists when belonging remains uncertain.

My work emerges from living between identities and geographies, shaped by Saudi Arabia, the country where I was born and raised but cannot obtain citizenship, and South Africa, my country of nationality and heritage, a place I have never fully experienced as home. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space, I explore the uncertainty of belonging and the instability of home. I find myself at a threshold, with one door slowly closing and another that has yet to fully open.

Doors and windows serve as recurring motifs throughout the work, acting as metaphors for boundaries and openings that promise entry while marking exclusion. In Saudi Arabia, doors symbolize privacy, while in South Africa, they are associated with security and protection. These differences reflect how belonging shifts according to place, law, and lived experience. Through photography, I examine the spaces between inclusion and exclusion and the desire for home and the possibility of losing it.

Photography allows me to preserve people, places, and histories threatened by displacement and erasure. Through light, framing, and the layering of different times and places, my images hold traces of what has passed alongside what remains. Portraits of my friends in Saudi Arabia reflect relationships that exist beyond legal definitions of belonging. Although my connection to Saudi Arabia remains legally uncertain, my relationships there are rooted in years of shared experiences, familiarity, and care. Through these friendships, I explore how belonging can be experienced beyond citizenship, through the people and relationships that make a place feel like home.

Other images bring together my grandmother’s hands and my own and architectural details. In self-portraits taken inside my family’s home in South Africa, I confront my relationship with a place that belongs to my family’s history but holds no personal memories of my own. Unlike my parents and sister, who have lived in the house, I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and have never experienced it as home. My uneasy presence within these photographs reflects my discomfort with claiming a place to which I am connected through heritage but not lived experience. These images explore the distance between inheriting a home and feeling that you belong to it. Together, these fragments carry memory across generations and continents, revealing how identity is shaped not only by where we come from, but also by what we carry, remember, and lose.

Alongside the photographs, objects and architectural elements carry personal and historical significance. A Roshan, a traditional Hijazi lattice window, embodies visibility without access, allowing light and air to pass through while maintaining separation. A concrete fragment from a demolished residential building in Saudi Arabia, which remained on my bedroom’s windowsill for years before being brought to South Africa, holds a physical trace of a place that may no longer be accessible to me. My grandfather’s inherited briefcase, containing documents that trace my family’s history and migration, connects personal memory to the structures that determine where we can live and belong. Together, these materials become fragments of an uncertain home.

Threshold gathers these fragments into a house without walls, an imagined home built from memory, connection, and material traces. It resists erasure while acknowledging loss, insisting that belonging cannot be measured by citizenship or geography alone. Instead, it emerges in the interstices of life: through relationships, inherited histories, and acts of remembrance. To live at the threshold is to inhabit contradiction. I live in a contradiction, as I am present but displaced, visible yet unclaimed, moving between the inside and outside. Through this work, I explore the precarious, continuous act of remaking identity and imagining belonging beyond borders.