Nicole Markoff

“The blind ones are immigrants… a group called blind passengers— people who entered the country ill, without a ship-card, without proper permits or without a passport”                                                               - Avraham Gulkowitz as Edward Weiss, Ellis Island 1924

The Blind Passenger is a project that questions personal identity through narrative. It is comprised of a tarot-like deck of fifty five cards with suits of entropy, sight, immigration, and textiles, and a major arcana of archetypes. Through chance and intent, the artist pulls cards for the viewer into a spread, or map, and a story is decoded through relationships between the images and their placement within the spread.

In its performative iteration, the private reading is duplicated on the wall in larger format cards (17″ x 23″) for the audience. Spreads, and thus stories, are witnessed by later viewers as evidence of the original narrative.

Serving as a compendium of my worldview and rooted in my grandfather’s immigration narrative (above quote), I am curious to discover the relationship that can be built between reader and querent, and what happens when personal narratives are fed back through pragmatic tools of divination.

Please contact for readings or more information on The Blind Passenger editioned deck.