UN/SAFE 

Prateek Vijan’s second exhibition at Gallery Khoshbakht extends his engagement with histories of colonial looting, their entanglement with the Western museum, and British anti-restitution laws. UN/SAFE features a series of discarded vault doors—objects commonly used to secure precious private property—which serve as carriers for Vijan’s imprinted photographic notes.

In the first room, a single fragmented image of a book collection centered on crime stretches across gleaming metal surfaces. Within Vijan’s critical yet poetic examination of legal constructs, this juxta- position gestures toward the complex relationships between wealth, power, and knowledge production, as well as issues around legality, accountability, and crime.

In the second room, fleeting images of locking mechanisms—essential components of the vaults— reappear on the slim metal doors as targets to be dismantled. They weave together Vijan’s research into institutional security infrastructures, lock-picking practices, and key-duplication machines. The aesthetic of technical precision is punctuated by repeating symbols, sketches, and photographs of animals, most frequently the image of a fly hovering silently over sterile stainless steel.

As visitors move through the exhibition, images continually fade in and out of view.
Only at specific vantage points, when the light reflected by the steel aligns the viewer’s angle of vision, does their full effect emerge. The imprints on the vaults thus operate analogously to the vault itself: while the vault withdraws private property from public view, Vijan’s technique complicates the legibility of the image, suspending it between abstraction and trace.

Paula Förster