In this paper I center the work experiences of Kabul-born photographer, graphic designer and cultural worker Musa Akbari in Iran in the late 20th and early 21st century. Born and raised in Afghanistan, Akbari first migrated during the Soviet invasion to Iran and has since then been based in Iran and lived and worked periodically in Afghanistan. Building on empirical research in Tehran in 2015 and conversations with Akbari in Tehran and Kabul, I theorize Akbari’s aesthetic labor in Iran as an entry point to offer new ways of conceptualizing racial capitalism, masculinities and migrant labor. I show how Akbari’s labor (his)stories expose changing processes of racialization through which the labor of Afghan-ized migrant Muslims is incorporated not only into carceral states and systems of Europe and the Anglosphere, but also in the (re)construction of Iran. His work in Iran and how he relates to lifeworlds in Afghanistan during wars and occupations requires a serious engagement with the question of belonging for Afghan-ized migrant laborers depending on the particular geo-temporal configuration of war in the “host” country, in this case Iran. I argue that Akbari’s work with Iranian institutions, Afghan/Afghanistani diasporas and organizations in Iran unravels the conditionalization of citizenship, belonging to transnational Shi’ism and public life in Tehran. I introduce the analytic bearer of war archives to think alongside interlocutors committed to aesthetic labor and the question of archiving in the mode of war. The concept, I contend, rivets on epistemological and political possibilities that knowledge generating labor offers for political theory.