Lujayn Schroeder

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Threshold

My work emerges from living between identities and geographies. Shaped by the country of my birth, Saudi Arabia, where I am denied citizenship and South Africa, a heritage I never fully inhabited. I exist in what Homi Bhabha refers to as the Third Space. It is a threshold where identities shift, belonging is provisional and home is never singular. It is a space where every border becomes both a passage and a barrier. It is the space I am currently in-between, with one door slowly closing in on me and another that has not fully opened yet. It is where gestures of arrival and departure coexist in silent tension. 

The photographs and objects that make up my work are fragments of this suspended state. The doors and windows are recurring metaphors for thresholds, openings that promise entry yet mark exclusion and screens one can look through but not enter. To me, the doors in Saudi Arabia signify privacy whereas, in South Africa, they signify security and the protection of life. These differences reflect the contradictions of my own experience where the borders of belonging shift depending on law, culture and place. The Roshan lattice embodies visibility without access, the possibility of engagement paired with restriction. Similarly, my grandfather’s briefcase that was passed down to my father and the archive of family ID photos, all become a vessel of impermanence and movement, serving as a reminder that home is never fixed and can be negotiated. I use photography as both a tool for observing and framing my lived reality, and a way of preserving histories, people, and places threatened by displacement and erasure. 

Through light and framing, multiple time periods and meanings are allowed to coexist in a single photograph, producing visual layers that retain the trace of the past. Portraits of my friends from Saudi Arabia are not documents of nationality but of intimacy, photographs in which citizenship is found in friendship, and belonging is enacted through care rather than law. Other works like the photographs of my grandmother’s and my hands, elements of buildings, and architectural remnants function as tactile memories, gestures of endurance that carry histories across continents and generations. 

Together, these fragments trace the spaces where belonging is provisional, contested, and fragile. Threshold gathers these fragments into a house without walls, an imagined home built from memory, connection, and material traces. It resists erasure while acknowledging loss, insisting that belonging cannot be measured by citizenship or geography alone. Instead, it emerges in the interstices of life: through relationships, inherited histories, and acts of remembrance. To live at the threshold is to inhabit contradiction. I am present yet displaced, visible yet unclaimed, inside and outside at once. Through this work, I explore the precarious, continuous act of making a home, remaking identity, and imagining belonging beyond borders.