Amak Mahmoodian – Exile and Return

Her photographs in the series One Hundred and Twenty Minutes do not document exile directly; instead, they translate the interior landscapes of dreaming into image form. Her approach occupies a space between the personal and the collective, between the psychological and the political, suggesting that dreaming may be the only place where borders cannot reach. Her work is at once tender – both feminine and distinctly powerful – as well as silkily ethereal and enveloping; it washes over the viewer like poetry.

Mahmoodian, coming to terms with her own exile from her native Iran, worked with sixteen people who have also been exiled from their homelands and now live in the UK. She created this series of black-and-white photographs, incorporating poetry, drawing, sketching, and video into the installation.

Since leaving Shiraz, Mahmoodian’s relationship with her mother has been mediated largely through backlit screens and the poetry she often writes to her daughter. It is the acknowledgement of this painful absence that Mahmoodian holds onto as a generative source of defiant creation, and around which all the work quietly revolves. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish likewise insisted on the power of dreaming to maintain a sense of hopefulness – to refuse surrender, and to transcend the insincerities of a world shaped by injustice and oppression. Dreaming becomes the guardian of memory, its resuscitation and life support system. In his poem A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies, he writes:

He dreams of white lilies, an olive branch, her breasts in evening blossom. He dreams of a bird, he tells me, of lemon flowers. He does not intellectualise about his dream. He understands things as he senses and smells them. Homeland for him, he tells me, is to drink my mother’s coffee, to return at nightfall.

At a time when suffering continues to unfold both within Iran and across the wider Middle East – when wars are fought in the language of liberation while leaving untold devastation in their wake – the feeling of longing, of dreaming, and of return becomes all the more urgent. Even if that return can only take place in the imagination, the dream remains a fragile but necessary space in which memory, hope and possibility can survive.

Amak Mahmoodian’s work is currently on show at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, where it is shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2026.

Text | Peter Watkins

All images | Amak Mahmoodian, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, 2019-2024