The 2025-26 CMS International Art Competition invited artists to explore the theme of Borders and Crossings, examining how migrants navigate not only physical boundaries between nation-states but also the cultural, identity, and social borders that shape their journeys.
A CAD $1,250 First Prize and a CAD $250 Second Prize were awarded by a jury composed of coordinators and members of the CMS Borders, Mobilities, and Narratives research groups.
Congratulations to the winners!
First Prize: Kimiya Missaghi, arrived here unintentionally, 2025
Given the nature of the materials depicted, CMS consulted with the artist regarding privacy and consent; the artist reviewed the work and approved it for publication.
This collage is about my older brother, and about what paper did to him. The most enduring borders he encountered were written in ink.
I wanted to approach the reality of how statelessness exists in one’s hands — in envelopes, in forms, in applications filled out, corrected, mailed back, and returned again. His life was structured by documents he did not possess, and by documents that failed to fully recognize him. I built this piece the same way we lived those years: dense layers.
The fragments are cut directly from over 2,000 pages of his immigration records, once assembled in an attempt to secure him an identification card. I tore and cut, stacked them, glued them down, then buried them beneath more paper. I wanted the surface to feel heavy, almost airless — the way paperwork can become the condition of your existence. Some words vanish entirely; others remain half-exposed. That partial visibility felt true.
His exclusion was never a single event. It accumulated. It was waiting, stretched across years, in cyclical fear of ICE. It was repeated explanations, the quiet humiliation of being told something was always missing. The more documentation we produced, the less stable his position became. I followed that logic visually: as the paper thickens, clarity disappears.
I attempted to humanize the dehumanization. Institutionally, he was perpetually incomplete. In life, he was not. He was protective, generous, exceptionally street-smart, and quick-witted.
For decades, his body was contained by documentation — determining where he could temporarily remain and where he could barely stand. His movement was restricted by printed paper. After he passed, his body was allowed to cross borders with care, borderless. The state power that had governed his belonging no longer imposed limitations once he was no longer able to ask to belong.
I wanted to illustrate how statelessness accumulates and transcends time and space, and overwhelms, because it is overwhelming.
The only elements not drawn from official records are two screenshots from our Messenger conversations. In Farsi, I called him “duh-dush”, older brother. That word interrupts the archive. It disrupts the administrative tone of statelessness. Whatever the documents declared, he existed fully in relation to me. My grief lives in this paper.
Kimiya Missaghi’s arrived here unintentionally is a powerful and creative reflection on the bureaucratic violence of transnational border regimes. The artist’s process, which included the collection and curation of over 2,000 pages of her older brother’s immigration records, highlights the dehumanizing processes of immigration procedures that attempt to define life through papers, identity cards, and biometrics. Through the use of collage techniques, Missaghi sets recurrent migration categories, such as “stateless” and “alien,” in dialogue with state actions, such as “judgment,” and “questioned,” to the banality of migrant criminalization. The composition thereby reveals tensions between the ephemeral nature of this genre of documentation and its materiality and material impact through the process of layering and juxtaposition. In this sense, Missaghi’s collage renders the otherwise intangible and oftentimes illegible processes of the failed immigration journey visible, while the collage format itself imparts some of the emotional aspects of these processes through its capacity to overwhelm the viewer.
Moreover, with the artwork’s incorporation of materials that move beyond formal identify and processing documents to include responses from embassies, decisions from U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services, text messages, photographs, and explanations from lawyers, the artist demonstrates how the border is a regime constituted by multiple actors and institutions, demonstrating through the metaphorical work of collage how a person literally gets lost in all the paperwork. Yet, despite the dehumanizing procedures represented, Missaghi positions her brother’s humanity at the very heart of her interrogation of his migration journey. Presented as his embodied self in three photographs at the centre of the collage, the viewer witnesses the protagonist age. The middle image features the artist’s brother as a teenager, staring directly at the viewer. The bureaucratic nature of these images reveals itself in their size and sterility, but the tender messages between “duh-dush” (older brother in Farsi) and sister, screenshots taken from their Messenger conversations, ensure the viewer never loses sight of the lives truly at stake in this process.
Kimiya Missaghi is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, where she examines the gendered dimensions of displacement. Her practice is informed by work with the Canadian Centre on Statelessness, UNHCR, and PeaceGeeks, where she has contributed to the development of digital tools supporting communities affected by displacement and statelessness. In this piece, she works with fragments drawn from her inherited familial archive. She traces how statelessness is lived through accumulated paper and bureaucratic processes that produce exclusion and precarity, while insisting on the full humanity of individuals reduced to documentation. Grounded in lived experience as a member of a refugee family affected by statelessness, her work brings together creative practice, scholarship, and advocacy for displaced and stateless communities.
Second Prize: Yasaman Khalili, Threads Between Us, 2025
The story of a Persian carpet begins long before a single knot is tied. It begins in the land itself — in highlands where sheep graze, in warm fields where silk rests inside pale cocoons, and in sunlit plains where cotton slowly opens to the air. Each material carries the memory of its landscape, traveling from different corners of the country toward a shared purpose.
In the hands of the labourers, these fibres begin their first migration. Row by row, thread by thread, the raw materials are woven into patterns shaped by patience, care, and repetition. The weave becomes a record of work, time, and touch — a quiet map of many lives, of hands that are rarely seen but central to creation. One of my drawings illustrates this journey: threads originating in mountains, plains, and fields come together in the loom, converging into a story written not in words, but in knots and texture.
A Persian carpet is never simply an object. It shapes the space around it and draws people together. It witnesses conversations, celebrations, rest, and storytelling. Carpets hold life within their patterns, anchoring moments of connection and shared experience. Yet these objects are not static. Carpets have long crossed borders and oceans, carrying culture, memory, and the traces of countless hands into new homes. My drawings visualize this second migration: threads stretch from their origins, still connected to their homeland, but moving across continents, weaving new histories, encountering new spaces, and connecting people far from where the carpet was born.
Threads Between Us translates this duality of visible beauty and hidden labour into a contemporary, interactive experience. It is a portable weaving game, contained in a small wooden box, designed to move as carpets do — across floors, across spaces, across lives. Players become the hidden labourers, weaving with patience and repetition, learning through action how cultural practices are shaped by both work and movement. There are no winners; the game emphasizes collaboration, communication, and shared experience. It invites players to inhabit the journey of the carpet, to feel the threads of labour and migration, and to understand how connections are carried across both physical and social borders.
By tracing the carpets’ migrations — from raw materials to homes, from one culture to another, from craft to play — the work reflects resilience, hope, and the quiet power of shared histories. It asks viewers to imagine how cultural objects and human labour move through borders, how they gather people together, and how meaning endures even when places, people, and lives shift.
Yasaman Khalili’s Threads Between Us is a beautifully crafted rumination on the material and social life of borders through the metaphor, physicality, and circulation of the Persian carpet. Presented in a series of illustrations and ultimately a portable weaving game that is “designed to move as carpets do” in a small wooden box, Threads Between Us reflects not only on the creation and distribution of Persian carpets as physical and cultural objects, but also on the movement of materials associated with their crafting, the spaces they create, and the “conversations, celebrations, rest, and storytelling” they bear witness to.
The project’s introductory image features a map, whose city streets are woven into knots by two sets of hands that emerge from the landscape itself. However, as the viewer’s gaze moves downward, the scale of this abstracted aerial view of the city shifts, and the lines and gridwork of urban planning melt into a rural landscape, where the farmers and agricultural workers are presented picking cotton and shearing sheep to make wool. The illustrations continue over the subsequent three pages, exploring the development of Persian carpet motifs and their basic design, social function, and spatial presence, culminating again in a map. This time, however, Iran is superimposed on a transportation map.
Through the work’s combination of image, text, and graphic design, Khalili’s Threads Between Us presents Persian carpets’ complex entanglements with migration and mobility, providing viewers with a visually poetic reflection on the craft’s cultural, social, and economic significance as it connects people and places both near and far.
Yasaman Khalili was born and raised in Iran, where carpets, poetry, and craft are part of everyday life. Almost three years ago, they moved to Canada to step into another culture — to learn, to grow, and to understand what it means to live between places. Migration changed the way they see the world. It made them notice what we carry with us when we leave: fragments of language, textures of memory, the rhythm of familiar hands at work. They have always been drawn to making, to the quiet intimacy of materials and the stories they hold.
“Threads Between Us” grew out of their final year in the Master of Architecture program at the University of British Columbia, in a studio led by Professor Thena Tak that invited her students to explore the idea of migration. Through the Persian carpet, Yasaman reflects on movement, labour, and belonging — on how something can travel far from home and still remain connected to its roots. Their work attempts to weave those distances into connection.
