Bridging Distances Across Oceans and Time (Closes 22.03.20)

The Iranian Bristol-based photographer Amak Mahmoodian graduated from the University of South Wales with a practice PhD in photography, having previously studied at the Art University of Tehran. Her most recent archival project Zanjir is currently being exhibited at the Arnolfini in Bristol. Alongside photography, film-making and curating she teaches photography at the University of the West of England.

Telling her own narrative whilst drawing into the present the life of the Persian princess and memoirist Taj al-Saltaneh (1883-1936), Amak participates in an imagined conversation that transcends the 100 years between them through language and art.

By working on a two-year research project at the Golestan Museum (a place once home to Qajars, the king’s wives, Harem women and their relatives) Amak has created a portal into a history parallel to her own, illuminating the impact of time’s movement and the distance between countries on her own family through the princess’s biographical narrative.

Through a collation of both her and Taj al-Saltaneh’s work Amak transcends the intangible temporal and physical distance between her and the princess, aligning their experiences and allowing a space in which personal but universal emotions and moments can be conveyed. The exhibition unfolds with a movement between photographs of the princess’s family (the earliest example of Iranian family photos), her mystical poetry, and Amak’s artistic response to her life as it was fragmentedly captured.

Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir, 2020 (installation shot, Arnolfini 2020) © Photography: Lawrence Bury.
Copyright Arnolfini 2020, courtesy of the artist and RRB Photobooks.

Translating to ‘Chain’, Zanjir establishes and demonstrates intrinsic human ties, with a meditation on the roots created by family and homes, alongside the repetitions we encounter throughout history, past and present, that we often ignore, distracted by the immediate aesthetic and technological progressions that appear to create distance between then and now.  

Amak is fascinated by the ability for photography to ‘repeat a moment that can never be repeated again’ reflecting our own lives back at us in a way that transcends immediate human experience. She points out that ‘it is only when looking at photographs or watching films that the past and present meet one another’ re-establishing connections lost in time.

Amak values the importance of telling the stories of others, bringing forgotten histories to the forefront through documentation. The mythical perception of time as described in the princess’s poetry,

‘In nature,/ man remains/ as he has always been,/ though the world never stays the same./ So it seems that we are tied to the strings of fate […]’ 

Through an imagined conversation both visual and vocal, the exhibition transcends limitational boundaries, whilst Amak’s thoughtfully composed family portraits and scenic landscapes create a space in which we can place our own story.

By Chloe Fox

Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir, 2020 (installation shot, Arnolfini 2020) © Photography: Lawrence Bury.
Copyright Arnolfini 2020, courtesy of the artist and RRB Photobooks.