Amak Mahmoodian – Exile and Return

4. 5. 2026

Amak Mahmoodian, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, 2019-2024

In conditions of social and political displacement, when borders harden and the right of return is deferred, the dream can be understood as a psychological form of resistant consciousness. Amak Mahmoodian’s insistence on the dreamworld as a site of social and political resistance finds its roots, perhaps, in the enduring prominence of poetry in Iranian society. For centuries, Persian poetry has functioned as a central civic language through which political consciousness, cultural memory, and personal (be)longing are articulated.

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

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 is the author of Shenasnameh (2016) and Zanjirher practice explores gender, identity and displacement, bridging the personal and political. Her work has been shown internationally (Arnolfini, Rencontres d’Arles, Peckham 24) and is held in collections such as Tate and the British Library. She is the author of Shenasnameh (2016) and Zanjir (2019), the latter awarded Best Photo Text Book at Rencontres Arles 2020.

Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins is an artist and educator whose work is rooted in photography and explores themes of loss, trauma, and history through archival and materially-driven practices. His projects have been exhibited internationally, including The Unforgetting and Unearthing (Lidice). Founder of Postcards for Palestine, he also lectures at FAMU and Prague City University, and his work is held in major collections such as the V&A and Museum Winterthur.

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