Spanning photography, poetry, text, drawing and video, Mahmoodian explores emotional and psychological landscapes in exile: how new lives are formed within dreams and the persistent return to the past. Over six years, Mahmoodian worked closely with sixteen collaborators from fourteen countries. Their long-term conversations focused on recurring dreams and the effects of exile on memory and identity.
Amak Mahmoodian One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, 2019-2024. Courtesy of the artist
A multidisciplinary artist and educator, Mahmoodian began her career in Iran and has been based in the UK since 2010, unable to return to her homeland. For her, dreams offer a vital connection to a lost home and family, between reality and imagination. In One Hundred and Twenty Minutes – the amount of time adults and children dream each night – Mahmoodian gives visual and poetic form to her collaborators’ dreams. Together, these elements invite us into an immersive experience of shared dreaming. At a time when ideological shifts continue to marginalise migrants and displaced communities, Mahmoodian imagines a world without borders, one where shared dreams form bridges across geography, politics and time.
More about Amak Mahmoodian
Amak Mahmoodian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. She began her career as a research-based photographer in Iran in 2003. Since 2010, she has been living in the UK, unable to return to Iran. She practices as a visual artist at the intersection of conceptual image-making and documentary photography, working with photographs, text, video, drawing and archives. She explores the presentation of gender, identity and displacement, working between personal and political across platforms and formats including installation, books and videos.
Mahmoodian’s work has been shown internationally, including; Arnolfini, Bristol; Rencontres d’Arles, Arles; and Peckham 24, London. Her works are held in collections such as the Tate and the British Library in London. She has published two books, Shenasnameh (RRB- ICV Lab, 2016), and Zanjir (RRB, 2019) which was the winner of The Best Photo Text Book award at Rencontres Arles, 2020. Her work appears in key titles on photography such as Photography – A Feminist History (Tate Publishing, 2021), Photography Now: Fifty Pioneers Defining Photography for the Twenty-First Century (Octopus Publishing, 2021), and How We See: Photobooks by Women (10x10 Photobooks, 2019).
