Tag: Amak Mahmoodian

Exile as a shared human experience

Spread across four floors of a Bristol townhouse, Amak Mahmoodian’s recent One Hundred and Twenty Minutes exhibition transforms the space into a chronotopia, writes Max Houghton – where many times, places and stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere. Fragments of countless lives emerge through photography, sketches and the quiet intimacy of shared dreams, all shaped by Mahmoodian’s 14-year experience of exile – a condition that continues to drive her work. Profoundly reparative, it invites us to see exile not as a marker of difference, but as a shared human experience.

Max Houghton | Exhibition review | 13 Feb 2025

Amak Mahmoodian’s recent show for Bristol Photo Festival 2024 recedes like a dream. Fragments remain … a feeling, hard to define, endures … awakening. You emerge changed. But the world is the same. The work in One Hundred and Twenty Minutes rises from below the ground. The first steps are into the unknown. Flickering light emanates from a dark cellar. This is where the dreaming begins.

Mahmoodian’s work is more experience than exhibition – a feeling more than a showing. Since 2019, she has been researching the psychological aspects of dreaming, and their connection to the condition of exile that has shaped her own life for the past 14 years. Born in Iran, unable to return due to the brutally extreme confines of its political regime, the solitude of exile bears ever more heavily. Since Mahmoodian left Shiraz, her mother is present in her life as FaceTime image on a screen, and in poems she writes to her daughter. Her physical absence in the space of the show is almost palpable as one of the many severed bonds, perhaps the most primal.

Photography transcends all its borders in this profoundly affecting work. Sketches, polaroid, poetry, video, still images, text; each forms a layer of meaning, or, (again), feeling. A spectral memory palace is constructed across four floors by Mahmoodian, in which the dreams of 16 people living in exile in the UK illuminate its walls. Over time, Mahmoodian listened to the stories of their dreams, and as first response, drew a sketch of its essence. Then, in a kind of alchemy, she constructed a photographic image; an image of an image. They appear here as offerings, rather than representations. The nature of the collaboration keeps a sense of the artist within the images, yet her role is closer to that of a conduit or a medium.

The images vibrate with texture, gesture, uncanny doublings, triplings – acts of translation in which a dreaming becomes a listening becomes a seeing. Displayed at different sizes and scales, mixing colour with black and white, they materialise from the walls as blinded statue, snake, ethereal dress, forest. And the ticking of a clock. There is no sense of unity or conformity within the images, but they are yoked together across two rooms and a set of stairs, by an unbroken line of sentences, perfectly positioned at the height of the cornice, which offer clues to the unconscious register: ‘As I go closer, I see she is losing body parts. I am scared. My belly button opens and I give birth to a fist. The stairs form a never-ending bright path. There are snakes everywhere.’

The ground floor is the grounding space. Here are vitrines displaying Mahmoodian’s sketch books – she calls them the heart of the work – polaroids, too, their instantaneity punctuating the deep time of exile. A poem, by the artist, reveals the work’s title: one hundred and twenty minutes is the time we spend in REM sleep each night. Below ground, the act of dreaming is shared too. Downstairs, in the dark, the viewer encounters a single screen, the camera trained on the face of a woman, asleep. Watching someone as they sleep is most usually a private act, occurring between a parent and a child, or between lovers. The intimacy of this spectatorship – there is room for just two people – sets the emotional tenor of the work as a whole. Dreaming eyes seem to be scanning lines, searching the archive, trying to locate the self, a place to which they can return upon waking.

During the show’s run, the space was activated for performance, and for meditation. It is as though it has been curated to animate conversation; thoughts turn to loss, and love and mourning. The four-storey town house on Midland Road has become a chronotopia, where many times, many places and many stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere (or somewhere to which you can’t return. Or someone). The making of work, the intensity of its subject, took a toll on Mahmoodian’s health a couple of years ago. She began to dream the dreams so carefully described to her, while her body kept the score. It coincided with the rise of far-right rhetoric intended to ensure that UK soil became a hostile environment for people who had crossed its borders to seek refuge. The work she has created is ultimately reparative, spiritual, even, as it seeks commonality instead of inscribing difference.

Edward Said, in his own work on the condition of exile, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), with photographs by Jean Mohr, wrote: ‘These photographs are silent; they seem saturated with a kind of inert being that outweighs anything they express, consequently they invite the embroidery of explanatory words.’ Mohr’s black and white photographs offer quiet visual testimony to the conditions that created the exile of the Palestinians. Mahmoodian’s work expands the register of the photography of exile with her luminous imagery, which seems to dwell in the realm of the unconscious. There are no explanatory words, because they are still being formed, still uncertain. Time has become non-linear, and, as the Surrealists expressed, seemingly disconnected objects and ideas appear on the same plane of seeing. Mahmoodian has tapped into the psychological and emotional power of the image to reveal the longing and the loneliness of exile, and the threat of violence that caused it and underpins it still.

The questions Mahmoodian wanted to raise in terms of whether there are similarities in the nature of the dreams of exiled people are not for me to answer. But among the achievements of One Hundred and Twenty Minutes is that the exploration of the question has conferred a sense of community among the participants, which is needed and desired by all involved. The work also expands the definition of what we understand as an image, or, rather, it throws a lifeline between a mental image and a material one. It might be that within this process is a small raft for survival. ♦

Amak Mahmoodian: One Hundred and Twenty Minutes ran until 17 November as part of Bristol Photo Festival 2024.

—
Max Houghton is a writer, curator and editor working with the photographic image as it intersects with politics and law. She runs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she is also co-founder of the research hub Visible Justice. Her writing appears in publications by The Photographers’ Gallery and Barbican Centre, as well press such as Granta, The Eyes, Foam, 1000 Words, British Journal of Photography and Photoworks. She is co-author, with Fiona Rogers, of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (Thames and Hudson, 2017) and her latest monograph essay appeared in Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 Voices (Steidl, 2023). She is currently undertaking doctoral research into the image and law at University College London. She was the 2023 recipient of the Royal Photographic Society award for education.

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Amak Mahmoodian

Zanjir

RRB Photobooks / IC Visual Lab

This book intrigues before you even open its cover. Gazing at both its front and back, Persian miniature painting springs to mind. I learn that the cover image is inspired by Mohammad Juki’s illustration made for Shahnameh (1010), the world’s longest poem written by one single poet. This reference frames the poetic character of the book, in which there is a rhythmical and persistent dialogue between the word and image. The book’s title Zanjir, which in author Amak Mahmoodian’s Persian mother tongue means ‘chain’, alludes to metaphorical links between past and present.

Woven throughout the book are re-presentations of archival portraits taken between 1860 and 1896 sourced from the Golestan Palace Library and Archive in Tehran, Iran, where Mahmoodian undertook an artist residency. Combining this archival material with her own original photography, Mahmoodian generates intriguing relationships between contemporary Iranian culture and its history. For example, four women are in repose in a public park, three are composed for their portrait whilst the fourth turns her back towards the camera – their faces masked by the nineteenth century archival portraits. Observing Mahmoodian’s photographs, Alan Sekula’s 1986 classic writing The Body and the Archive comes to mind, in which Sekula suggests that the territory of information within an archive is revealed by how it is indexed. Through the prism of Mahmoodian’s lens these archival images are re-activated; her sitters perform for the camera, portraits are made and individual identities concealed.

Upon opening this book, the reader enters an imagined conversation between the feminist Persian Princess of the Qajar Dynasty, Taj Saltaneh (1883-1936) and Mahmoodian. Their dialogue continues throughout the book as they lament love, loss and memory. Dividing the book in the middle are a series of elegiac black and red photographs of Mahmoodian’s father on which traces of the poem Shahnameh can be seen tattooed across his body. Through these photographs, Mahmoodian navigates memories of her late father. When photographs cannot convey the depth of emotions captured in them, Mahmoodian’s words offer affective anchorage to the images.

The portrait images are punctuated by the desert landscape, a landscape that holds traces of a human presence yet cannot be geographically located. These photographs are a symbolic reminder that the desert is the only place in which you can see your own shadow. Gazing at these landscapes one’s imagination can breathe. As I reflect on this book I wonder whether it is limiting to refer to it as a photobook, as it calls on both image and text equally to link together lands, cultures, languages and memories. The poetry of words knit together the imagery contained in the book. It is a reflective book that contains a deeply personal narrative which pertains to broader concerns of love, grief and exile, that are tightly held in our hearts. After all, as the Mahmoodian–Saltaneh dialogue suggests: “Isn’t the review of one’s personal history the best undertaking of the world?” ♦

—Caroline Molloy

All images courtesy RRB Photobooks / IC Visual Lab. © Amak Mahmoodian

Top 10

Photobooks of 2019

Selected by Tim Clark

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2019 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark.

1. Long story short
Fraenkel Gallery

Long story short sees San Francisco-based Fraenkel Gallery return to publishing. Coinciding with the current exhibition marking the gallery’s 40th anniversary, this book is an endlessly rich slice of 180 years of photographic history. It aims to convey “that visceral sense of experiencing a work of art for the first time, in ways that defy words.” With a taste for the eclectic, it certainly delivers. Enigmatic photographs, such as the anonymous Untitled [Dinosaur Balloon], November 25, 1969 cover image, ricochet against immediately recognisable images from some of the medium’s stalwarts – Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Katy Grannan or Eadweard Muybridge to name but a few – all continuing to entrance, all brought together in a celebration; not only of Fraenkel’s anniversary year, but to also retune our attention on the pleasures and rewards of sustained looking. With its sumptuous printing and lavish production values, Long story short is a joy to behold. A door to the heart of a gallery that has done so much to contribute to the culture, study and appreciation of photography as an art form in the United States and beyond.

2. Salvatore Vitale, How To Secure A Country
Lars Müller Publishers

As a case study to consider critical global issues, such as borders and immigration, Salvatore Vitale’s How To Secure A Country promulgates a timely and deeply-layered look at 21st century statehood. Edited with Lars Willumeit, this long-term visual research project – as opposed to an investigation of a ‘closed’ topic – deals with the machinations and protocol of security systems in Switzerland, a country widely regarded as one of the world’s safest. The work is organised into visual clusters to reflect the collaborations with individuals from different disciplines and via access granted by various institutions, both public and private, including those relating to borders and customs, cybersecurity, data centres, armed forces and even weather forecast and supercomputering. How To Secure A Country offers a privileged perspective and multi-vantaged point of view on the fraught relationship between individuals, power and state control, yet never through images that are self-explanatory, nor without pronouncing judgement. In Vitale’s work there is always space for the viewer.

3. Lisa Barnard, The Canary and The Hammer
MACK

Another book of first-rate intelligence is Lisa Barnard’s Canary & The Hammer, spanning four years of photographic work shot across four continents. The artist’s third monograph takes gold as a subject – its complex history, relationship to wealth accumulation and symbolic representation – to demonstrate its myriad of uses and ubiquity in modern life. Deftly combining image, text and archival material within a structure of seven chapters, Barnard’s project embraces a fragmented narrative as a metaphor for our dissonant and uncertain times. Overlapping disparate yet related stories, ranging from the 1849 Gold Rush or activities by Peruvian mining organisations to jewellery manufacturing and high-tech industry, hers is a larger vision comprised of systems, contradictions and affects, ultimately cognisant of capitalism’s proclivity to both exploit and self-destruct. Throughout her career, Barnard has rigorously tested and questioned parameters within contemporary documentary practice, all the while reflecting on photography’s ability to render visible such vast and seemingly unimaginable themes.

4. Masahisa Fukase, Family
MACK

It’s a swell time for reprints of photobook masterpieces. And MACK has been leading the way in recent years. Amongst its latest have been Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home and Alec Soth’s Niagara, and now comes Family by giant of Japanese photography, Masahisa Fukase. First released in 1991, and the artist’s final book, the project centres on a series of group portraits showing Fukase and his relatives in the family’s professional studio that were shot over nearly two decades. Family utilises the ritual of the family portrait but subverts it by featuring various nude or partially dressed women, many of whom are young performers or student actors bearing no relation to the family. Melancholy is piled on melancholy in these photographic gestures of commemoration. Touching on issues of memory, empathy and dispersal, it reflects what Geoffrey Batchen has referred to as “the desire to remember, and to be remembered”. And as Tomo Kosuga notes chillingly in his parting words to one of the book’s essays, Archiving Death: The Family Portrait as a Site of Mourning: “As we meet their staring eyes, we may feel that the process of the mourning vigil, conducted around the Fukase family, is taking place within ourselves.” File under: ‘essential titles’.

5. Hassan Hajjaj, Hassan Hajjaj
RVB

As the eponymous title suggests, this is a book about the vibrant Anglo-Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj – his creative universe, unique visual language and cultural remixing – that provides a noteworthy contribution to this year’s offerings. Remarkably this is Hajjaj’s first major monograph, produced to accompany the recent retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. It draws upon his signature colour work that so effortlessly and promiscuously straddles modes of documentary and fashion photography. It also reunites this with hitherto unseen black and white work. His is an approach to studio and street portraiture that harks back to the traditions of Malick Sidibé, but which is given a contemporary twist through the bricolage of high and low cultural references in order to shine a light on the louche of global consumerism. The book’s design perfectly augments the content of the imagery by drawing out the repeated motifs and all-over compositions in an explosion of patterns and visual textures. Pluralism and new signs of recognition are the order of the day.

6. Anastasia Samoylova, FloodZone
Steidl

Necessary images from the frontiers of climate emergency in the southern United States make up this brooding exploration of the people, spaces and surfaces existing in preparation of its onslaught. Rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten but it’s the absence of any drama or action that defines Anastasia Samoylova’s FloodZone. Instead, as individuals wait and look on, conjured is an atmosphere akin to a mood piece laden with suspense and foreboding. Through a skilful blend of luscious imagery, encompassing lyrical documentary photographs and black and white studies – by turns staged and spontaneous – along with epic aerial views, and touching upon issues of paradise, tourism, decay and renewal, FloodZone constitutes an inventive addition to the slew of recent approximate visions of the Anthropocene. As David Campany notes in the monograph’s essay, “Paradise is as photogenic as catastrophe.” And while “the seductive contradictions of a place drowning in its own mythical image” is indeed embodied, Samoylova’s is a fantastic double vision, proffering depictions that oscillate somewhere between the already seen and never seen.

7. Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Hola Mi Amol
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions and ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne

Readers of 1000 Words will recall the recent magazine feature on this highly-original monograph. Within it, French-Dominican artist Karla Hiraldo Voleau has made it her business to take us on a journey through her personal history in Hola Mi Amol, one that burrows into her dual heritage, its influences and prejudices. As a child Voleau was often warned to treat Dominican men with suspicion, ergo the slightly leery title of this book project, and here she returns to the island of her youth to actively seek out those very individuals she was warned about. A cast of nude or partially-dressed men populate the photographs – seen at the beach, in homes and motels or riding on the back of motorbikes via selfies with the artist – in images that both resist the admonishments of her family and, by natural extension, play us as viewers on a meta-level. Combined with text extracts, Voleau’s intersections call into question ideas of authenticity and ambiguity in the narration of the artist’s various encounters. Hola Mi Amol speaks through the most personal and private experiences relating to eroticism, prowess and racial identities. Ultimately the male gaze has in effect been turned on itself to powerful, and at times beguiling, effect.

8. Sohrab Hura, The Coast
Ugly Dog

Blood splatters, smoke bellows, tattoos sore, rats cower, tears fall – the visual experience of leafing through Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura’s fourth monograph The Coast is akin to a feverish dream. Chosen by the jury of Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Book Awards as Photobook of the Year, there is something clearly so captivating about The Coast. And what’s interesting eventually winds up beautiful too. Opening with an absurd short story of a woman named Madhu, who has quite literally lost her head, the tone is set for an intense and unrelenting narrative that Sohrab relays in twelve varying iterations. It features photographs taken up and down the Indian coastline that work in service of what the artist refers to as “a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.” Images are printed full bleed with only a narrow white gap creating a continuous visual flow – or assault – while their shifting contexts furnish our gaze onto a disorientating post-truth world, particularly in a country where disinformation and acts of violence are on the rise. Reality teeters between fact and construction in this fable for the times.

9. Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir
RRB Books/IC Visual Lab

“This book is a conversation imagined between the artist Amak Mahmoodian (1980-present) and the Persian princess and memorist Taj Saltaneh (1883-1936).” So reads the preface to Zanjir, a riveting book hot off the press by Bristol-based, Iranian-born Amak Mahmoodian. What unfolds through sequences of quiet photographs – both authored and appropriated from the Golestan archives in Tehran – is a moving meditation on the actuality of having one’s family based there but no here and the hybrid experience of living between cultures, lands and languages, all bound up in sensations of love, loss and longing. From the subtle gaps between recording and not forgetting emerges this deeply poetic look at the vestiges of the past as they move into the present only then to become the past again. Time, memory, dreams and their inevitable decay approach something so powerful as it relates to the homeland. Mahmoodian, by her own admission, has created “a life of memories” swaying between presence and absence. With a stellar team of editors including Aaron Schuman and Alejandro Acin, Zanjir is a personal and rich foray into the imagination of an understated and poetic artist.

10. George Georgiou, Americans Parade
Self-published

This is the kind of photography that renews a feeling of wonder every time we gaze upon its imagery. Here, we are witnessing the theatre of life as seen through the parade of Americans during 2016, the year Donald Trump came into office and when the country had revealed its profound fractures. George Georgiou’s black and white photographs show one community after the next in a project spanning 24 cities across 14 states. Crowds of various sizes are captured via a simple but effective approach of photographing wide and from a distance to form tableaux-style images, their constancy bestowing a feeling of detachment but also one of acute observation. Revelling in the abundance and complexities of individuals who make up group identities, it is almost as if Georgiou is invisible – such is the candour. In these instances, people never stare down the camera, but instead focus on something beyond the frame. And they resonate with us, so pressingly that we look for ourselves in them. As we scrutinise the minutiae in such detail, images within images emerge, resolving into a kaleidoscope of mini portraits that are full of contemporary trappings. It thus offers up a valid document; in the same way the various locales reflect the socio-economic disparities of the United States to speak volumes of the environments in which the photographs were taken. Something must be said of the book’s quad-tone printing and its importance in revealing the sumptuous detail of the scenes, which, combined with lay-flat binding, allows viewers to really enter the imagery: exquisite. ♦

—
Tim Clark is a curator, writer and since 2008 he has been Editor in Chief and Director at 1000 Words. 

Captions:

1-Eadweard Muybridge, Contortions on the Ground, 1887. (Long story short, Fraenkel Gallery)

2-Salvatore Vitale, A customised assault rifle transformed for sport purposes, from the series How To Secure a Country, 2014-18.

3-Lisa Barnard, Gold-miner Kimberly, at the Las Vegas Gold & Treasure Show, 2017, from the series The Canary and The Hammer.

4-Masahisa Fukase, from the series Family, 1971–89. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris.

5-Hassan Hajjaj, Keziah Jones, 2011. Courtesy Vigo Gallery, London, and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York.

6-Anastasia Samoylova, Park Avenue, 2018, from the series FloodZone. Courtesy Galerie Caroline O’Breen, Amsterdam.

7-Karla Hiraldo Voleau, from the series Hola Mi Amol.

8-Sohrab Hura, India, 2014, from the series The Coast. Courtesy Magnum Photos.

9-Amak Mahmoodian, from the series Where Time Stood Still.

10-George Georgiou, 4 July Parade, Ripley, West Virginia, 04/07/2016, from the series Americans Parade.