One Hundred & Twenty Minutes: Amak Mahmoodian
One Hundred & Twenty Minutes: Amak Mahmoodian
Premiered as part of Bristol Photo Festival in October 2024, Amak Mahmoodian's long-term project One Hundred & Twenty Minutes used images, poems, archives and video to explore the dreams experienced by those in exile. The work was produced collaboratively with communities of refugees and asylum seekers across the UK.
Working with 16 collaborators, all of whom are exiled from their native countries, Mahmoodian uses photography, poetry, drawing and video to explore the new lives created through dreams, as well as the ways in which dreaming enables individuals to return to a past that cannot be reached while awake. The title, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, refers to the average time a person spends dreaming each night. The project was supported and commissioned by Multistory and D6: Culture in Transit.
Beginning 2022, Amak worked with sixteen people living in exile in the UK, each of whom shared their dreams with her over the course of many long-term conversations, exploring ideas around the effects of exile and distance on memory, dreams and daily life. Amak Mahmoodian’s work weaves connections between south/central Asia (particularly Iran) and the region’s many diasporas, focussing on the stories of those rendered silent by official narratives.
See here for more information on Bristol Photo Festival.
About Amak
Working with photography, text, video, drawing and archives, Mahmoodian’s artistic practice explores the representation of gender, identity and displacement, weaving connections between the personal and the political. She has published two books: Shenasnameh (RRB & IC Visual Lab, 2016), which was shortlisted for the First Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles; and Zanjir (RRB, 2019), which was the winner of the Photo Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. Mahmoodian completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales (2015) and currently works as a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England.
