13/02/2025
Thanks .houghton8 and
For the review of One Hundred Twenty Minutes by at part of the festival.
with .repost
• • • • • •
Spread across four floors of a Bristol townhouse, Amak Mahmoodian’s recent One Hundred and Twenty Minutes exhibition transforms the space into a chronotopia, writes Max Houghton – where many times, places and stories co-exist, and memories materialise out of nowhere. Fragments of countless lives emerge through photography, sketches and the quiet intimacy of shared dreams, all shaped by Mahmoodian’s 14-year experience of exile – a condition that continues to drive her work. Profoundly reparative, it invites us to see exile not as a marker of difference, but as a shared human experience.
'Photography transcends all its borders in this profoundly affecting work. Sketches, polaroid, poetry, video, still images, text; each forms a layer of meaning, or, (again), feeling. A spectral memory palace is constructed across four floors by Mahmoodian, in which the dreams of 16 people living in exile in the UK illuminate its walls. Over time, Mahmoodian listened to the stories of their dreams, and as first response, drew a sketch of its essence. Then, in a kind of alchemy, she constructed a photographic image; an image of an image. They appear here as offerings, rather than representations. The nature of the collaboration keeps a sense of the artist within the images, yet her role is closer to that of a conduit or a medium.'
1000wordsmag.com/amak-mahmoodian-one-hundred-and-twenty-minutes
houghton8
