Rosaline Dou
7 x 4 inches (17.8 x 10.2 cm)
2024–25
with Inji Kim
Optional Practical Trainees interrogates how U.S. visa systems shape the professional and creative trajectories of international art workers. Optional Practical Training (OPT), a temporary work authorization that allows eligible F1 students to gain work experience, forces young artists and cultural workers to constantly justify their legitimacy in an ecosystem that demands self-commodification and frames art as “practical” labor. Co-authored by Dou and Kim, both of whom navigated the OPT process, the two authors came together in the fall of 2024 to question OPT’s “optional” impracticality and ask who we are “approved” to become under immigration regimes.