Between history and fable: Mashid Mohadjerin at FOMU, Antwerp
Channelling the voice of a feminist naqqāl – a reciter of epic tales – Mashid Mohadjerin reweaves the fables and histories her father entrusted to her, threading memory and myth across generations as part of her new parallel book-exhibition project, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish. Through image, collage and legend, Mohadjerin rewrites inherited patriarchal narratives into a visual language of resistance; reframing memory, masculinity and the legacies of displacement against the broader landscape of Iranian politics and constructions of manhood, Taous Dahmani writes.
Taous Dahmani | Exhibition/photobook review | 26 June 2025
Once upon a time, a little boy was playing in a shallow river winding through a sunlit mountain. One day, that same boy had to hide in the river’s meagre depths to escape blazing bullets. I grew up with that story – frightened for the boy, terrified of the men with guns. It was a bedtime story, but also a way of passing down history: the lived realities of colonial occupation in Algeria. The storyteller was my father. The little boy was my father, too.
For Mashid Mohadjerin, one of the many stories she heard from her father began like this: “A firing squad waiting for the smoke of their guns to clear.” An action-packed scene – gunfire, enemies and heroes – one of whom was the artist’s great-great-great-grandfather. But beneath the drama lies a deeper truth on of wars of ideology and territory. It’s another tale where history and bedtime fable meet, where legend is used to carry the weight of lived experience. In her latest book, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish (2025), Mohadjerin remembers an exchange with her own father: ‘“Do you want me to continue reading?” he asked, his voice low, as if not wanting to break the weight of the moment. “Yes, please,” she replied, lost in the threads of history that twist and loop around us, familiar yet foreign, like a story that feels both ours and not ours.’
Displaced, Mashid Mohadjerin’s father arrived in Belgium with his family in the 1980s; by then, my own father was already telling bedtime stories of 1950s Algeria to my sisters and then me in Paris. These stories may have been crafted to captivate children, but they were also a way to share a past too heavy or too painful to be spoken plainly – so it came cloaked in a different narrative form. In both our families – and in many others that have been shaped by the silences of displacement or colonial violence – history is often passed down, wrapped in narrative: it is rendered more fantastical than the brutal realities it conceals, skirting around political, religious, or personal taboos. Yet through storytelling, these histories endure. They keep alive those who left us too soon or disappeared without trace. Stories then offer continuity to the fragmented.
In light of this, Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish becomes an experimental visual family tree, an autobiography made of tales: reimagined and retold from a position that resists silence. Mashid Mohadjerin weaves together peaceful black and white landscapes taken as she retraced the places where family stories may have unfolded. These images set the stage, grounding myth in geography, and searching for ancestral traces. The narrative drifts across time and place – leaping between centuries and countries – yet always returning to the thread of memory as story. Whether encountered in book form or in an exhibition (as recently shown at FOMU, Antwerp), Mohadjerin’s characters refuse to remain confined to the frame or the page. The figures escape the constraints of their own contours, reaching toward other forms and shapes, seeking to engage across time, space, and medium. This gesture is present throughout the work, but most vividly in the collages, where fragments converge and overlap.
Whether knights, princes, mullahs, boxers – Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish is populated by characters of many forms. But it’s impossible not to notice that all these figures are men. History, like legend, has long privileged the bravery of men, casting them as the central actors of the past. And indeed, Mohadjerin’s project began with the discovery of a family manuscript from the 1850s – rich with twists, turns and dramatic episodes, but almost entirely devoid of female agency. These male-centred ancestral narratives did more than recount what happened; they shaped how the world was seen and remembered, reinforcing gendered hierarchies and social structures across generations. As Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote in her 1989 essay Grandma’s Story (recently republished by Silver Press, 2025), that kind of ‘story is either a mere practice of the art of rhetoric or a repository of obsolete customs.’ But at some point, displaced fathers began telling their stories to daughters – not simply to preserve tradition, but to offer the knowledge needed to question it.
Mohadjerin’s narrative strategies deliberately unsettle these inherited power structures. She reclaims the storyteller’s role, becoming a contemporary feminist naqqāl – a reciter of epic tales – who reimagines the myths of kings and heroes through a woman’s gaze. She doesn’t just inherit the narrative; she takes control of it. In other words ‘Diseuse, Thought-Woman, Spider-Woman, griotte, storytalker, fortune-teller, witch’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989), Mohadjerin transformed the audible into the narratable, and the narratable into the visible. She created a visual language for family stories – one that also speaks to the longer histories of Iranian politics and constructions of manhood. In Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish, metaphors of masculinity abound: rocks that stand firm, tensed muscles, men bearing arms, horsemen in motion – figures of strength, pride and endurance. But because the story is told by a woman, other images emerge too: portraits of vulnerable elders, colourfully dressed men, ageing bodies, men caught in moments of dance or struggle. These juxtapositions expand the visual vocabulary of manhood, revealing its tenderness, contradictions, and fragility alongside its inherited postures of power.
With Riding in Silence & the Crying Dervish, Mashid Mohadjerin challenges not only traditional photobook narratives but also prevalent modes of storytelling. Nothing is fixed; everything is pulled apart, non-linear, and layered. By attending to the silences and gaps, knowledge about one’s family and homeland takes on new, unexpected forms. Blending poetry, essay, archival collages, portraits, and landscape photography, Mohadjerin offers a radical reimagining of how stories embody identity, history and culture. To summon Trinh T. Minh-ha again: ‘The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the responsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring.’♦
All images courtesy the artist and FOMU, Antwerp © Mashid Mohadjerin
Mashid Mohadjerin – Spiralling Outward ran at FOMU, Antwerp until 8 June 2025.
** This essay is dedicated to all the story tellers in Iran and beyond, who keep reading bedtime stories, despite it all.
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Taous Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator. Her expertise centres around the intricate relationship between photography and politics, a theme that permeates her various projects. She is an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Dahmani’s curatorial work was showcased at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, where she curated the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2022). In 2024 Dahmani curated exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia; NŌUA, Norway; and Saatchi Gallery, London.
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