Comprised of a video, an installation and a take-away poster, “Section Yellow” addresses bureaucratic rituals and security protocols people face upon travel. Playing on the notion of waiting and navigation required in the immobility of taking upon a journey. A central piece of the body of work titled “Section Yellow” is the film “The Distance from Here,” The film is a single-channel video that is shot between two settings: an outdoor ‘security check’ and an indoor waiting room. What people are waiting for is not immediately clear and the observer waits with the actors until it becomes clear that a visa or travel document is the ultimate prize from the waiting room. The film explores the charged scenography of visa application processes in the Global South, mining the anticipation, collective anxiety and entanglement of personal being and bureaucracy. Multiple frames and gestural narratives follow a group experience along the threshold of legal and illegal belonging. Abidi plays with the disciplinary corpus of immigration infrastructure, particularly around Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad, focusing on the surrounding informal economy populated by photocopy shops, legal notaries and passport photo booths. Choreographing each scene with intimate detail, Abidi reveals the insanity involved in travel for those of us who are relegated to security checks and waiting rooms.