Each page of the Syrian passport carries a monochrome image of a historical or modern architectural monument. Together, these selected landmarks construct an official image of the nation within the very document that identifies its citizens and regulates their movement.
In Afterimages, Barakeh isolates these monuments from their bureaucratic setting and projects them across six walls of a completely darkened room. The videos are synchronised so that only one image appears at a time. The room then returns to complete darkness before another monument emerges elsewhere. This shifting sequence choreographs the audience: each illumination draws viewers towards a new location, only to leave them searching again when it disappears.
Preserving their muted, spectral appearance on the passport page, the structures gradually emerge, fade, and return. After each image vanishes, its luminous trace briefly persists in the eye, like the afterimage produced by looking towards the sun or another bright light. Perception itself continues to carry what is no longer physically present. For those forced away from home, place can persist in a similar way: no longer accessible as immediate surroundings, yet retained as a fragmentary and unstable image.