Bendar Al-Bashir: Artist Statement

A stretch of seaside shacks. A broken fountain in a desolate urban park. A deserted midnight corner, blocks from the silent seat of central government. A pod of rusted bumper cars, patient on a muddy cliff above a war-scarred city’s slope toward the Mediterranean.

Disparate locales, but here, from Mumbai to Beirut, from Chennai to Bucharest, young boys and girls earn the oldest, hardest living in the world: the lot of a child sex worker.

Being a foreigner in these lands, I’m often approached by these children, trained as they must be to scout for non-native tourists. And the backwater arenas where they scout for work are so far swept from the tourist boulevards; portraits of place and face becoming inseparable.

One wonders at the causality: Was the space born with the youngster or did it, this strange landscape known as home, spawn their need to work?

Of course, the answer is neither. The real cause lays in the discarded histories, the unplanned futures of a disposable class and generation, left behind to the carnivorous sexual violence born from poverty: this virus knows no borders.