Originally born and raised in Mumbai, I grew up learning four languages simultaneously: English, Hindi, Marathi, and my mother tongue, Tamil. Now living and working in the United States as a recent immigrant with no last name, my temporary status informs my interest in the contradictions of legitimacy and legibility within America. Drawing from the aesthetics of bureaucracy, my work considers the erasure that occurs when one’s value is translated through a stack of papers. I engage with the materials and language found in government buildings, airports, classrooms, and other spaces, where the body undergoes categorization and evaluation. Text from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website become etchings in drywall, redacted over time, while stacks of ghostly Monobloc chairs, made from brown butcher paper, occupy space like figures in a waiting room. Single file lines of stanchions that hold TSA dog photos design a strategic maze, while carbon paper tracings of my mother tongue become part of a painting. Through these actions and objects, I examine my on-going relationship with bureaucracy, blurring the lines between the domestic and the institutional, the intimate and the formal, the hand and the machine. How does bureaucracy know me, even at my most vulnerable?