Alqumit Alhamad

“Violence of Documents” is an ongoing artistic research project that examines how official documents and bureaucratic systems perpetrate violence, particularly in contexts of war, displacement, and asylum. Drawing on his experience as a war refugee, Alqumit Alhamad investigates how visas, stamps, signatures, and border control documents serve not as passive records but as instruments of control, exclusion, and delay.

This project adopts bearing witness as a method. It involves a critical engagement with the material and symbolic force of documents that have governed the artist’s movement. Bearing witness here is not testimonial in the conventional sense, but an aesthetic strategy that exposes how bureaucracy erases, disciplines, and disorients. These documents are not neutral. They produce emotional, legal, and existential consequences. By tracing and transforming them, Alhamad resists administrative logics that depersonalize and silence.

A central theoretical framework is necropolitics, particularly as defined by Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics highlights how states manage life and death, not only through overt violence but through bureaucratic procedures that produce suspension, waiting, and invisibility. Bureaucracy becomes a site of slow violence, where documents regulate not only movement but the very possibility of being recognized as a subject.

One key material element is a pigment Alhamad created, called ‘Dictatorship Blue,’ derived from the blue hues found in the ink used in migration and border documents. This blue encapsulates the banality and force of administrative control. Transforming ink into pigment is not merely symbolic; it connects the body to the paper, the personal to the institutional.

Alhamad has previously developed this project through exhibitions, workshops, and research across Sweden and elsewhere. This residency at Onassis AiR in Athens marks a critical continuation. He returns to crossing zones he once moved through when he had no choice, fleeing war, unseen, and unwanted, not as a war refugee, but as a Swedish resident. This shift in legal identity transforms his relationship to these sites, highlighting the arbitrary and constructed nature of bureaucratic power. It positions him to re-engage not as a subject of control but as a witness to its systems.

In Athens, Alhamad will work through research, artistic experimentation, and collaborative exchange. He aims to connect with local artists, activists, and displaced communities through workshops and conversations that will shape the direction of the work. These encounters are central, as they allow the documents to be re-read as contested sites of memory and resistance.

Athens, with its historical and ongoing role in European migration regimes, offers a crucial context. Alhamad plans to engage with both institutions and grassroots and informal spaces that archive lived border experiences. His workspace will function as a space for production and dialogue, where outcomes emerge through relational, open-ended processes.

“Violence of Documents” does not seek resolution. It asks how we might confront the bureaucratic state not only by exposing its violence but by transforming its forms through new ways of seeing, making, and bearing witness.