Welcome to the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and our current exhibition entitled Zanjir by the artist Amak Mahmoodian, curated by Alejandro Acín (IC-Visual Lab) and Kieran Swann (Head of Programme, Arnolfini).
Zanjir is a conversation imagined between the artist, Amak Mahmoodian (1980-present), and the Persian princess and memoirist, Taj al-Saltaneh (1883-1936). Through photography and a series of coupled texts, the exhibition is a meditation on distance - reaching through histories to bring the earliest images of Iranian photography into the present, across oceans to distant family and friends, and across the border between life and death.
In Zanjir - translated as ‘chain’ - Mahmoodian casts her subjects as a series of links; stretched taut, reaching into the past. Her work attempts to resist the irresistible drive into the future, and explores how the passage of time can pull people and places apart.
The exhibition opens up a tentative conversation between the present and both 19th century and mythological early Iran. Incorporating photography drawn from research at the Golestan Archives, Mahmoodian profiles Naser al-Din Shah (known as “the modern monarch of the Qajar era”), and his forays into family photography. An artist as well as a state leader, the Shah received his first photographic camera as a gift from Queen Victoria. His subjects were his family - his wives and their relatives; and most importantly to Mahmoodian’s research, his daughter Taj al-Saltaneh.
Taj was a prominent early feminist in modern Iran, a founder of women’s rights groups, Taj organised marches on parliament, hosted literary salons, and publicly advocated for structural change to the monarchy; publicly criticising the rule of her father. This difference in political views did not diminish her love, however - and it is in this adoration of their fathers that al-Saltaneh and Mahmoodian find a mirror in each other.
Through coupled texts, the artist and al-Saltaneh exchange solace, reflect on loss, and bare the wound of the very moment of their fathers’ passings through a combination of imagined writings, and excerpts from her widely-studied memoir.
Both families recur through the images of the exhibition. Mahmoodian’s father is a striking, bearded figure. Among clusters of Mahmoodian’s families and friends that are masked by faces drawn from the archive, his presence is keenly felt. We also see him at his most vulnerable in Mahmoodian’s intimate photographs of his tattoos (drawn from Shahnameh, an epic Iranian poem. These tender, submerged images and other careful clusters are interspersed with large scale portraits.
Zanjir invites us to imagine these images as portals that recede beyond the gallery walls, into memory and myths.
The exhibition itself is entered through two curtains, printed with black and white images of Iranian landscapes, which have been photographed by the artist. They lead the visitor into a bright, white passageway. On the left hand wall is a text by Mahmoodian (the first of a series of fragmented conversations that appear throughout the gallery. It is repeated on the right hand wall in Farsi, handwritten in silver ink by the artist’s sister.
The text reads:
between the veils
Today
I think about things
that I forgot to remember
I remind myself
to remember
If I am afraid of the life
I have created in photographs
it is because of my dreams
I dream
I remember
With no family but memory
With no land but traces
My land travels within me
I live in the past
I have created a life
A life of memories.
