Tag: London College of Communication

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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Writer Conversations #8

Max Houghton

Max Houghton is a writer, curator and editor working with the photographic image as it intersects with politics, law and human rights. She runs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she organises regular public talks, symposia and exhibitions. Her writing has appeared in publications by The Photographers’ Gallery, London and the Barbican, London, as well as in the international arts press, including Foam, 1000 Words, Photoworks and Granta. With Fiona Rogers, she is co-author of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (Thames & Hudson, 2017) and her latest monograph essay on Mary Ellen Mark will be published in 2022 (Steidl). She is a Laws faculty scholarship doctoral candidate at University College London. With David Birkin, she is co-founder of research hub Visible Justice.

At what point did you start to write about photographs? 

I had just finished the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) course in 2001, and was researching (more than writing) for a Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, when Jon Levy, who’d I’d met through a mutual friend, asked if I’d write for his new website for photojournalists, Foto8. He sent me a set of photographs taken in Vietnam by an American photographer called Les Stone, which documented the ongoing transgenerational effects of Agent Orange. It was a fascinating exercise, because immediately I felt a responsibility to the overall subject matter of the Vietnam War, to the photographer and to the people in the pictures who I would never meet. Also, my question was: am I writing about the images or about the subject matter? These concerns endure. Six years later, I began an MA in critical theory (I didn’t have a first degree) to help me think them through. Foto8 grew from being a kind of dotcom start up to a published magazine, which eventually, along with Lauren Heinz, I edited. My bottom-line excitement, in staying with photographs for so long, is the idea that what we see never resides in what we say… It is an infinite relation, as Michel Foucault wrote. I’m always skipping from one register to the other, and back again.

What is your writing process?

My writing process is essentially reading, listening, editing, running and sleeping. I think that if we let it, our ‘back brain’ (please don’t ask me for the science!) works it all out while we’re doing other things. I can only understand something if I’ve written about it, or if I’ve been lucky enough to have a proper dialogic conversation on the subject. I’m not a hugely opinionated person, so it’s important to afford very close attention to the work, and indeed to spend time with it, in order to find out what it might be that I think, or that the work emits.

What are the questions or problems that motivate your writing? 

I’m interested in the idea of being able to write with photographs, which I hope might be a practice underpinned by an ethics of care. I think this is an originally feminist term, which resists patriarchal injustices… And while, of course, that is part of my intention, I also mean to use the term in relation to the root of the word ‘curate’ – cura – which is a specific way of paying attention. If I am asked to write with an artist’s images, it is important to me to impart the same kind of care in my writing as the photographer did in the original images. I don’t tend to write about work that doesn’t move me; in that sense I’m not a critic at all, though I know there is useful place for such writing. I’m also motivated by what (photographic) images might do in the world, and in how, as technical images (as Vilém Flusser described them), they combine with other images in the world to stimulate thought processes. The image brings a different form of knowledge, which is different again when combined with text. It’s fair to say the image-text is the underlying question that motivates my writing. As well as this, I’m always interested in what moves me; what connects me to actual feeling, and, as a logical extension of that, what might move others. At best, I hope my words might sometimes connect people to emotion. I think we can all exist very superficially. If we take time to notice how we feel, and when we feel, and manage not judge those feelings as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we may be able to spend a little longer thinking about what matters. Finally, I continue to seek an inclusive practice, and my desire to challenge and refuse brutal, dangerous and often dominant power structures that shape our world remains potent.

What kind of reader are you? 

Oh, reading. I don’t know who or what or how I’d be without it. I wish I could read everything I want to read, but then I wouldn’t live. It’s simply how I understand the world; it’s been my way of being in it all my life. I guess I’m that kind of reader!

How significant are theories and histories of photography now that curation is so prominent? 

I’m not sure one precludes the other? I’m very glad to see how curatorial practice is expanding to unpick those questions that theories or histories might more traditionally cover, but surely they are all interwoven as discourses? Okwui Enwezor’s 2002 documenta would offer a very significant example of such weaving for me, for example. I wonder if I fully understand the question? I certainly see how curation is influencing future theories and histories, even in terms of whose histories are being made visible. It’s also an aspect of my way of being with photographs that recently I’ve been able to pursue, but this is not an isolated or removed practice… On the contrary…

What is the role or currency of the idea of documentary in your writing? In Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (2017), the book that you co-wrote with Fiona Rogers, both your photographer selections and the written project introductions propose exciting new terrain for documentary practice. It is practically a manifesto for expanded documentary.

Fiona’s wonderful Firecracker platform rightly foregrounds the individual work of the artists, and I guess we were not seeking to make such a statement. I’m grateful for your phrasing; it’s absolutely documentary that grounds me, but not in any kind of limited way. I see documentary as a desire to gain evidence of something vital, something that needs to be seen, shared and understood; afforded attention. Its methods can and indeed must be as expansive as possible. The kind of work that understands how documentary images have been used to categorise and control; the kind of work that has ingested some of the world’s trillions of other images; the kind of work that seeks; the kind of work that may never even be finished… This is what interests me.

What qualities do you admire in other writers?

Clarity, (emotional) honesty, generosity, nuance, wit, precision, creating images through words, humility, mystery, playfulness (not necessarily all at once)… The same qualities I admire in other humans(!).

What texts have influenced you the most?

All works by W. G. Sebald, without question (though of course there ought always to be questions). T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1941). Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), Philippe Sands’ East West Street (2016), Patricia J. Williams’ The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991). Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Roy de Carava and Langston Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), bell hooks’ Teaching to transgress (1994), Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980), “To See and Not See” (1993) by Oliver Sacks, “You’re” (1960) by Sylvia Plath… I could go on…

What is the place of criticality in photography writing now?

Central, isn’t it? Like always? ♦

Further interviews in the Writer Conversations series can be read here

Click here to order your copy of the book

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Writer Conversations is edited by Lucy Soutter (University of Westminster) and Duncan Wooldridge (Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London), upon the invitation of Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University).