as we lose sight of the line across the sky

  • Dates
    2023 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Topics Portrait, Social Issues, Contemporary Issues, Editorial, Travel, Documentary, Photobooks
  • Location India

The work attempts to highlight the arbitrary "borders" and politics of belonging to negotiate with the idea of home. It seeks to build a visual inquiry of migration, return, and liminality. Examining identity, memory, power, and global inequality.

Focusing on people returning from “different countries” to "India." The work traces a collective journey of remigration through individuals, shaped by experiences of hope, longing, and estrangement. Their decision to move and return unfolds across both personal and political levels, where the border between choice and compulsion is blurred by larger systems in place. 

Through the lens of historical migration patterns and cultural anthropology. It highlights the redirection of the subcontinent's historical connection with its Asian neighbors and the formation of borders. The restructuring that continues to shape global maps, international visas, and educational policies, dictating who can migrate where and under what conditions. Today, the resource and capital concentration intensifies geopolitical anxieties, and states retreat into more rigid, closed, contested, monolithic, exclusive, and divided national identities.

Existing in a state of transit, the work moves between push and pull, outside and inside, uncertainty and familiarity. Bearing witness to lives reshaped by the possibility of return and the ongoing search of belonging.

© Utkarsh Singh - Vaibhav Sharma, a door to nowhere
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Vaibhav Sharma, a door to nowhere

© Utkarsh Singh - Ship of theasus
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Ship of theasus

© Utkarsh Singh - Mahima Soni, freedom to move
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Mahima Soni, freedom to move

© Utkarsh Singh - Pratibha & Ashok Maghotra, the Ambassadors
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Pratibha & Ashok Maghotra, the Ambassadors

© Utkarsh Singh - Meet Sheth, different perspectives
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Meet Sheth, different perspectives

© Utkarsh Singh - line across the sky
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line across the sky

© Utkarsh Singh - belonging without borders
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belonging without borders

© Utkarsh Singh - Pooja Thakrar, making a place
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Pooja Thakrar, making a place

© Utkarsh Singh - rock and a hard place
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rock and a hard place

© Utkarsh Singh - Abhishek Singhania, the transit
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Abhishek Singhania, the transit