In the heart of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Mongolian photographer Suniko Bazargarid proposes a question that feels uncomfortably urgent: Where would we find you if we need to find you?
The phrase, which titles her solo exhibition at BAXTER ST’s new 154 Ludlow Street space, speaks to today’s migration fears. “I was with my mother… and we went up together with the border patrol officer, [who] was just asking questions like, where are you going? Where would we find you?” Bazargarid said. “Internally, I was thinking of why would you need to find me?”
The exhibited series arrives as immigration debates in the U.S. grow increasingly tense. Yet Bazargarid avoids the usual sides of the discussion. Her work explores what it feels like to live between places and identities. “Out of context, it could sound almost endearing, like when a parent asks where you’re going,” Bazargarid said. “But the root of it is just kind of intense.”
A 2025 Baxter Street Artist in Residence and graduate of the International Center of Photography’s Creative Practices Program, Bazargarid brings a deep sensitivity to themes of migration and identity. Having lived between Boston, Singapore, Bangkok, and Mongolia, she’s developed a visual language shaped by in-betweenness. Her work, shown in New York, Paris, and Bangkok marks her as a rising voice in contemporary photography.
The exhibition tells a story through photos, mixing film and digital images with pieces of official paperwork, forms, ID photos, and passport stamps, elements that show how institutions simplify complex lives into data. “They’re all self portraits that I just made over the years,” said Bazargarid. “Along with the past photos that I’ve made, I’ve had to have get taken.”
Bazargarid’s exhibition grew out of a year-long period of stillness and uncertainty. “Most of the work was made in the past year in Mongolia,” she said, describing how she became “stuck there waiting for a visa to come through from the United States.”
During that period, she began making images as a way to process the tension of being both home and displaced, observing that her photographs are “not like a linear story… it’s mostly observations and things that I’ve been seeing when I was there.”
“I just layered [the photos] with stamps from my passport page,” Bazargarid said. For her, these marks became reminders of the bureaucratic weight behind movement. “All of the intensity of it,” as she put it, transforming her photographs into meditations on identity, belonging, and the uneasy borders that define who gets to move, and who must wait.
Expansive Mongolian landscapes punctuate the claustrophobia of documentation, offering visual respites that suggest both origin and abstraction. These scenes remind viewers that beneath every bureaucratic label lies a geography of memory, ancestry, and longing. “In my images, there are barely any people,” Bazargarid said. “I think I was trying to find moments where I could take a deep breath, where the land itself felt like a pause.”
The exhibition layout underscores this idea of reflection and fluidity. Rather than a linear arrangement, the prints curve along the wall in a wave-like form, creating an installation that feels alive and in motion. In the center of the gallery, one photograph rests flat on the floor.
These gestures make the viewing experience physical, almost participatory. To move through the exhibition is to navigate fragments of a life in transit, mirrored and rearranged through time and space. “Home isn’t necessarily where you’re from, it’s wherever you can sleep for a week without worrying that the world is going to burn down,” Bazargarid said.
