Amak Mahmoodian
United Kingdom
One Hundred and Twenty Minutes
Through photography, poetry, drawing and video, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes examines the emotional and psychological landscapes of dreams in exile, the new live we create within these dreams, and the ways in which they keep returning us to our past.
Research shows that on average, adults and babies dream for around two hours, or one hundred and twenty minutes, every night, even if they don’t remember it. As an artist with lived experience of exile and displacement in the last fifteen years, dreams are a form of connection to my lost home and family, located as they are on a spectrum between reality and imagination. One Hundred and Twenty Minutes is my attempt to understand this experience in others, by collaborating with individuals who cannot return to their homeland and live in exile in the UK.
This expanded body of work was developed over six years, emerging from a series of long-term conversations between myself and sixteen collaborators from fourtee different countries about their recurring dreams, and the effects of exile on memory. I then visualised these conversations into images, often using models and techniques of reenactment to materialise dream sequences. In exploring the lives creat-ed and reanimated through dreams, the work proposes that dreaming enables a return to a past that cannot be reached while awake. It also reveals the ways in which dream logic, whilst deeply personal, is underpinned by a shared under-standing and a universal language. The images are accompanied by short texts drawn from the conversations, which further illuminate the dream space.
One Hundred and Twenty Minutes is both an evolving participatory experience for the subjects interviewed, who are my collaborators in the work, and also a way for non migrants to understand the feelings of marginalisation, exile and loss through the universal language of dreams.
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, archives and sound. Her practice explores the presentation of gender, identity and displace-ment, bridging a space between personal and politica across platforms and formats including installation, books and films.
Mahmoodian’s work has been shown internationally, including the Carnegie Museum of Art. Pittsburgh; Fototeca Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires; the Benaki Museum, Athens 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 Histor (Tate Publishing, 2021), Photography Now: Fifty Pioneers Defining Photography for the Twenty-First Century (Octopus Publishing, 2021), and How We See: Photobooks by Women (10×10 Photobooks, 2019)
