My travels to Europe began 13 years back. While transiting through the Gulf states, I became fascinated with the bustling megalopolises of Arabia, a cold post-apocalyptic vision of towering megaliths seen across the hazy abrasive heat.
Modern civilisation in Arabia was built with the sweat and grime of countless unremembered migrants.They travelled from the southern climes of the Indian subcontinent and south-East Asia, lured by dreams of better lives for themselves and those they left behind, fellowmen from familiar lands, all setting forth westwards like me, towards their unknown destinies.
Tricked by agents back home and cheated by the law of the land: lives lived on meagre food in unsanitary cramped quarters, women raped and locked away in dingy rooms, men dead from exhaustion or dehydration or both, lives where basic human rights are stripped away to their very core.
CROSSINGS is created with the help of Google Maps and Google Earth, wherein the images were taken. I show the society that the migrant diaspora has helped construct, shape and maintain while occupying the bottom echelons of society.
The narrative is woven around quotations found in Academic Reports and Journalistic Articles on the existing state of affairs in Arabia. The quotations primarily deal with individual experiences of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, but also include the Emiratis and the Western expatriate population.
Here is the book version and here is the gallery of images.