Bristol Photo Festival Archives

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.

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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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Stephen Gill

Coming up for Air

Exhibition review by Jesse Alexander

On the occasion of Stephen Gill’s retrospective at Arnolfini, Jesse Alexander highlights how the artist’s varied and prodigious output from the last 30 years has been underpinned by restless experimentation and a rich sense of place.

Despite subtle signage suggesting that visitors start their visit to Stephen Gill’s extensive retrospective Coming up for Air at Arnolfini, Bristol on the gallery’s first floor, most visitors will begin at ground level, chronologically reversed, and enjoy the Bristol-born photographer’s more recent works. The ground floor gallery is dominated by Night Procession (2014–17), The Pillar (2015–19) and the more recent series Please Notify the Sun (2020), which was completed during the lockdown. The repeated views from a trap camera installed in a field near his home in Sweden that comprise The Pillar have been published widely, and at varying scales. Yet this installation is the largest display of prints from the series (first published in book form in 2019) and the linear arrangement in the gallery accentuates the flat, expansive topography of this view as well as the cadence amidst the series’ repetition. With the focus set to infinity, the background is always sharp, giving a sense of these creatures’ enchanting, temporary presence, but also perhaps hint at the birds’ own appreciation of the backdrop to the stage on which they perform. In those where the birds have their backs to the camera, they take on the role of the Romantic Rückenfigur, contemplating the meaning of the scene that unfolds before them. It’s hard not to anthropomorphise the birds’ myriad startled expressions and clumsiness or, on other occasions, to simply be in sheer awe of their spectacular elegance.

Where The Pillar gives an impression of place in the sense of its broad surface features, Night Procession, also made with a trap camera, pulls us right down into the floor of the forest, even incorporating mud and plant pigments in the printing process. Adjoining this space is an additional projection of this work: the duplication of images might be unnecessary, and Gill’s original collotypes are no doubt delightful objects, but the luminosity of these nocturnal images projected, all the while accompanied by the braying chant of Ada Gill’s cello, is evocative without being melodramatic.

Although in fact the outcome of a meticulous and diligent strategy, The Pillar and the infra-red flashed fauna in Night Procession typifies the low-fi aesthetics that are often associated with Gill’s work. Upstairs however, where the exhibition ‘starts’, we are reminded of Gill’s precocious technical accomplishment with photography (it’s a little like seeing early Picassos and being reminded at his draftsmanship before he turned to abstraction). The exhibition retrospective is accompanied by a publication bearing the same name of the exhibition but has even more images and fewer words to introduce discrete bodies of work (although there is an essay by the Arnolfini’s director, Gary Topp). Gill acquired technical skills early; his photographs from his teens and his twenties – from his travels and his observations closer to home – have a confidence and effortlessness to them that exceeded his years (it is also worth noting that, unlike the majority of his contemporaries who studied art and design at under- and postgraduate level, he completed a foundation course at college before working in industry). Gill’s raw skill as a photographer is perhaps most apparent in his portraits; the passengers he systematically photographed in Day Trippers (2001), the Gallery Wardens (2003) and the (mostly) older women in Trolley Portraits (2000–03) all seem to have been offered a space in which to present themselves authentically to Gill’s lens, entirely of their own volition, and seem to exude a sense of thoughtfulness and nobility.

Despite his ability as a portraitist, Gill is perhaps more associated with the representation of place (the exhibition is programmed as part of the Bristol Photo Festival 2021, the theme of which is a sense of place). Perhaps some of the least visually striking, yet most amusing works are his Billboards (2002–04) and Birds (2005–10). As with many of his series, these were the products of a strict strategy, and in these the result being a discordant relationship between the final image and text: Billboards shows us the backside of advertising hoardings, and often there is a contrast between the seductive strapline that titles the images, such as L’Oréal Paris. Because you’re worth it, and the grotty corner of some indistinct city periphery, shot with New Topographic-esque deadpan objectivity.

Consumption also features heavily in Gill’s seminal work from the period, Hackney Wick (2003–05), an affectionate essay dominated with flea markets, completed – legendarily – on a camera purchased there for fifty pence. This period and this body of work appear to have liberated Gill from received documentary aesthetics of the time and catalysed an increasingly experimental, exuberant approach in his practice. The abundance of, for want of a better word, ‘stuff’ that we see in Hackney Wick mirrors Gill’s own preoccupation with found objects and their potential for meaning.

Gill has incorporated found objects from an area into the final images in visually dynamic ways, including Hackney Flowers (2004–07), which are a kind of photocollage with objects laid on top of photographs, and Talking to Ants (2009–13), where objects were placed inside the camera, simultaneously obfuscating and embellishing views. Cabinets in the exhibition present some of these ‘primary sources’ – some of which are as ephemeral as drinks-can ring-pulls – and these further enhance the sense of reverence for the place and his subject.

Other projects have focused more specifically on found objects, such as his pictures of rocks and bricks used as missiles during the London riots in Off Ground (2011) and the folded, torn and otherwise frustration-wrought fruitless betting slips he found discarded on the street near his home in A Series of Disappointments (2007). This merging of place and artefact is also explored in Buried (2005–06) which involved burying prints, allowing the soil and ground to react unpredictably with the chemistry in the paper. This curiosity in the alchemical nature of the medium is also evident in Best Before End (2013), where Gill experimented with the effect of energy drinks, controversially marketed towards teenagers, on photographs, revealing their chemical potency.

In addition to the cabinets, the main upstairs gallery features the staggering number of Gill’s photobooks, almost exclusively published by himself. These aren’t ‘on display’ as such, nor are they presented in a traditional kind of ‘further reading’ area, but on a distinctive freestanding shelving unit. Perhaps it is the unimposing jaunty angles of the shelves, or the unfinished wood, which makes handling these remarkable pieces feel like a genuinely welcomed aspect of the experience of the show, and perhaps a less intimidating activity than it might otherwise feel like.

There is a certain radiance in Gill’s practice. It is distinctly playful; belligerent without being aggressive or stifled in self-assured irony. Maybe there is a youthfulness in his determination to persevere with a self-imposed strategy, or one of his many dilatory methods: an unstoppable belief that a project will, sooner or later, inevitably come together. But politics runs quietly through the veins of Gill’s work and, moreover, his willingness to embrace the aleatoric and to abrogate responsibility for substantial aspects of creative processes are admirable characteristics. Whilst I’m reluctant to draw things to a close with an often-cited remark about Gill, his output is astonishing. There is a huge amount of highly accomplished work in the exhibition, without becoming overwhelming, and also in the six hundred odd-page accompanying monograph. There is much more that could have been shown, but there is a lot more to come.♦

Installation views of Coming up for Air at Arnolfini, Bristol from 16 October 2021 – 16 January 2022, part of Bristol Photo Festival 2021. Photographs by Lisa Whiting.

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Jesse Alexander studied at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, Farnham, and the University of Wales Newport, and is a photographer, writer on photography and lecturer based in Somerset. His writing and projects are primarily concerned with landscape and the representation of place, and he is the author of Perspectives on Place: Theory & Practice in Landscape Photography (2015). He is currently Course Leader for MA Photography at Falmouth University.

Images:

1>2-Installation view of Coming up for Air at Arnolfini, Bristol, 2021. Photograph by Lisa Whiting.

3>4-From The Pillar 2015–19.

5>6-From Night Procession 2014–17.

7-From Pigeons 2012.

8>9-From Talking to Ants 2009–13.

10-From Hackney Flowers 2004–07.

11>12-From Hackney Wick 2001–05.