WUJUD
by K. Azril Ismail

/wuːˈdʒuːd/ noun [Arabic / Malay]: to find, to experience, to exist.

A city moves. A body does not. Between those two facts, K. Azril Ismail has spent years encountering these individuals.

WUJUD is a series made on the streets of Kuala Lumpur since 2022, turning its lens on individuals who have withdrawn from the world the city insists is the only one.

Their bodies rest on concrete while the mind has already left for somewhere quieter. Ismail photographs from above, stripping away the pavement, the noise, the indifferent rush of a modern capital, until what remains is simply a person, suspended between here and elsewhere, between the visible and the vanished.

This is not a document of poverty or failure. It is a meditation on a strange and terrible freedom: the discovery, in the hardest of places, of an interior life the city cannot touch.

Kuala Lumpur says these figures do not exist. Ismail keeps returning. And they are still there.