Living with Uncle Sam
What happens to a person when their identity is rewritten by a new, more influential country?
What does it mean to share that experience publicly?
Through hybrid images, fractured videos, synthetic sound and unstable materials, Living with Uncle Sam positions the landscape of immigrant experiences as unstable. One that is constantly negotiated, dismantled and rebuilt. In bringing this artistic archive into public view, the work encourages emigrants to find moments of relatability in hidden labor of assimilation and natives to re-examine their assumptions about place, culture, and power.
Phase 1 - Hybrid Photographs (2016 - 2020)
"I remember not having any direction. A sharp fear of the unfamiliar remained constant."
In the midst of severe political unrest, financial stress and a hope of a stable future I arrived in the USA in late 2016 as a reluctant 21 year old Bangladeshi immigrant. The rupture of leaving Dhaka along with the pressure of merging into the American lifestyle meant losing not just a home, but also the grounding that home provides. Assimilating into the first world’s culture feels less like an organic integration and more like painful, forced lobotomy.
Living with Uncle Sam closely operates within what theorist Homi Bhabha calls the third space : the unstable in-between where cultural identity is constantly negotiated. It attempts to capture this violent landscape of immigrant assimilation through a deep personal lens and eventually navigating the conversation out into the public sphere.
Living with Uncle Sam's first phase is primarily an archive. However, since the act of artmaking is often inherently political; as a byproduct it also surfaces the political tensions of the time it captured.
"During my first few years in the USA, I remember not having any direction. A sharp fear of the unfamiliar remained constant. I would photograph my surroundings with my phone: mundane and absurd objects, dysfunctional spaces and more. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of myself in these subjects. The rest were just as directionless as I have become.
The images were never to capture a straightforward documentation of reality, nor are they pure inventions. They are hybrid, synthetic images. Altered and unsettled yet no less true"
In preparation for public viewing, these photos have often taken different physical forms and adjusted their shape depending on space and audience.
In 2019, a part of the work was exhibited in Dhaka, Bangladesh using CRT televisions and backlit frame fixtures. They were also imposed with soundscapes and placed alongside handwritten text only visible under blacklight
In 2022, it was shown again. This time in Texas, USA at the end of an Austin residency program. The images in this exhibit appeared greater in number but much smaller in size. Over a hundred 1×1 inch inkjet prints were submerged in water-filled plastic shot glasses on a vibrating platform.
No real text or context was included. It was a quieter, more subtle presentation, mainly shaped by the unknown fear of not being understood, and a self-inflicted hesitation to be vulnerable in front of an "alien" audience.
Phase 2 - Video and sound (2019-2023)
Eventually, Living with Uncle Sam grew beyond a set of personal experiences and began absorbing fragments of a collective one. It expanded from static hybrid imagery to noisy, moving media and incorporated the global noise of the past that has shaped today's immigrant experience.
By overlapping personal memory with the broader visual ethos, the work in this phase positions the immigrant identity at the unstable coagulation of multiple cultures. It also situates the private experience of the migrant at a boiling point. Where it continually withers identity while violently mixing with the public, society, politics and everything in between.
Similar to the migrants conditions outlined in Bhaba’s in-between space, the media in this phase also oscillate between humor and trauma, nostalgia and noise, collapsing timelines between the past that formed the present. The work no longer speaks only to one individual's personal labor of assimilation rather it becomes a collective clot of unstable experiences containing the global condition of immigrant identities.
Phase 3 - Gelatin Objects (2024 - ongoing)
"On the day they made me a U.S. citizen, I took two photos of myself — one before the oath, one just after. It’s unsettling that the pictures are almost identical, yet between them my legal identity has been irrevocably altered.."
Phase 3 continues the project’s gradual shift in both material and conceptual focus. As Living with Uncle Sam moves from photographs to moving images and now to gelatinous objects, it mirrors how the process of assimilation never stabilizes. It keeps reshaping itself through new encounters, new pressures, and new forms of visibility. The gelatin works mark a stage in which the archive turns inward again, yet the personal and the political remain inseparable. What begins as a deeply individual experience now runs parallel to larger global patterns of displacement,
The images were printed on offset paper with an old home printer, then embedded in pig fat gelatin blocks. The ink bled into the fat, forming cyan stains and dissolving the portraits into a murky, semi-real space.
"The gelatin itself carries personal meaning to me, since I had an upbringing where it was considered "haram", untouchable. Even though religion is no longer a part of my individuality, the sentiment remains."
"After all these year, my personal lobotomy of assimilation has perhaps been completed. I have successfully achieved a condition of absolute, irreversible rootlessness; a perpetually floating state devoid of identity."
Ata Mojlish - 2025
