Arash Fayez – Apolis
Abbas Kiarostami’s celebrated 1990 docufiction film Close-Up tells the remarkable true story of Hossain Sabzian, an impoverished cinephile who, after a chance encounter, convinces a wealthy family that he is the renowned Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Under this assumed identity, he ingratiates himself into their lives, promising them roles in his supposed upcoming film. When soon enough his deception is discovered, Sabzian faces arrest and media scrutiny. Kiarostami, learning of the case through a newspaper article, visits Sabzian in prison and obtains judicial permission to document his trial. However, rather than merely filming the proceedings, the director then takes an unprecedented step: with the consent of all people involved, he has them reenact key events leading to the trial, with each person portraying themselves. The result is a film that transcends its seemingly straightforward premise, evolving into a complex meta-narrative that masterfully blurs the lines between documentary and fiction, reality and representation, while exploring what it means to construct personal mythologies in search for a sense of belonging in a world that often refuses it.
Apolis examines questions of identity and belonging through the lens of Fayez’s own experience as someone caught in the liminal space of US bureaucracy.
It is fitting, then, that Iranian-born, Barcelona-based artist Arash Fayez’s Apolis (Spector, 2024) prominently features one of the film’s final frames—Sabzian riding on the back of the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s motorbike—laid over two documents, one typed, one handwritten. Like Close-Up, Apolis examines questions of identity and belonging, though through the lens of Fayez’s own experience as someone caught in the liminal space of US bureaucracy. The book documents his life from 2014 to 2018, when, after obtaining his MFA at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, he found himself in a civil gray zone which his immigration lawyer described as: “not illegal, but (…) not legal either.” In this state of precarity, Fayez—like Sabzian—lived between worlds, navigating a system that both defined and denied his presence.
In his practice, Fayez frequently engages with such themes of displacement, identity, and the politics of movement. Working across writing, performance, and video, he examines states of limbo—both mental and physical—where individuals exist between locations, cultures, and identities. Apolis, which won the 2023 LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award, weaves together Fayez’s complete US immigration dossier—from his arrest by law enforcement authorities to his eventual voluntary departure from the country—with intimate documentation of his daily life. Smartphone photos and screenshots capture everything from mundane objects, American landscapes, and everyday meals to Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, artworks, symbols of Islamic faith, his Iranian heritage, text conversations with friends, and video calls with family abroad. The personal fragments—“collaged” over sections of the immigration files to conceal sensitive information—stand in stark contrast to the cold, bureaucratic language of the documents, creating a powerful juxtaposition that underlines the ambiguities of diasporic existence. Through more than three hundred pages, Apolis becomes not just an archive of Fayez’s experience but a poignant reflection on what it means to live in a state of enforced in-betweenness—physically, culturally, and psychologically.
Apolis weaves together Fayez’s complete US immigration dossier—from his arrest by law enforcement authorities to his eventual voluntary departure from the country—with intimate documentation of his daily life.
To historian and writer Siri Hustvedt, it is precisely this state of perpetual liminality that allows for meaning to emerge. In a captivating essay in her 2022 collection Mothers, Fathers, and Others, Hustvedt explores the nature of borders—not only as political and territorial separations but as conceptual structures that shape human understanding. She argues that all boundaries—geopolitical, linguistic, temporal, cultural, social—are ultimately porous, unable to contain the fluidity of lived experience. Meaning, she suggests, often resides not within fixed categories but in the interstices, the gray areas between things. This insight is crucial in understanding Apolis: where the rigid, impersonal bureaucracy of immigration law fails to grasp the fullness of Fayez’s existence, it is through the seemingly random fragments of his everyday life that his diasporic identity takes shape. As Hustvedt reminds us, “there’s always going to be some mess, and the truth is we need the mess to help us ask questions about why things are the way they are and how they might be different. No single classification system with strict borders, no encyclopedia in any particular field can contain the shifting borders of dynamic human experience.”
Such a vision is particularly urgent in today’s political climate, as Western nations continue to enact increasingly hostile immigration policies, with most recently, the new Trump administration once again placing a radical crackdown on immigration at the center of its agenda. The book’s title, Apolis—which translates to “without a city or nation”—signals a reimagining of belonging beyond the constraints of nationality. Here, Fayez’s personal document finds a broader political resonance: if meaning and value exist in the in-between spaces, then so too does a vision of community that is not bound by rigid geopolitical borders but formed through shared experiences of movement, uncertainty, and resilience. In this sense, Fayez’s work not only amplifies through a personal account the stories of those navigating precarity and displacement but also challenges the very notion of citizenship as defined by state-imposed legal frameworks.
Ariella Azoulay argues that photography can create a unique civil space that bypasses the nation-state’s authority to define citizenship and belonging. Fayez, by documenting his experience against the grain of bureaucracy’s reduction of human life to paperwork, engages in precisely this kind of civil reimagination.
This perspective finds further resonance in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (2008). Azoulay argues that photography, by virtue of its accessibility and capacity for wide circulation, is inherently open-ended and serves as a critical tool for producing, interrogating, and disseminating information beyond geopolitical boundaries. In this sense, photography can create a unique civil space that bypasses the nation-state’s authority to define citizenship and belonging. Fayez, by documenting his experience against the grain of bureaucracy’s reduction of human life to paperwork, engages in precisely this kind of civil reimagination. He becomes, in Azoulay’s terms, an active participant in the “citizenry of photography”—a borderless community formed through the act of creating, engaging with, and appearing in photographs. Apolis thus moves beyond simply documenting displacement to become a powerful assertion of presence and identity. Even as official documents deny Fayez legal recognition, his photographs and personal artifacts insist on his humanity and visibility. Through this act of self-representation, he embodies Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “right to have rights”—claiming dignity and recognition in defiance of the bureaucratic systems that would render him stateless.
In an era of escalating border regimes and exclusionary policies, Apolis serves as both testimony and resistance. Through its interplay of personal memory and bureaucratic record, intimate imagery and official documentation, the book challenges the structures that seek to define and delimit human existence. In doing so, Fayez not only tells his own story but opens a space for rethinking what it means to belong—what it means to exist beyond borders, in the shifting, contested space of the in-between.
Arash Fayez
Spector Books 2024
