Zanjir – Amak Mahmoodian

Zanjir is an imaginary conversation between the artist Amak Mahmoodian, born in Shiraz, Iran in 1980 but living in Bristol, and the Persian princess and memoirist Taj Saltaneh (1883 – 1936).

In Zanjir, Amak Mahmoodian draws on images from the King’s collection dating back to the 19th century and preserved in the Golestan archives in Tehran, mixing them with some images he took both in Iran and in England. The ultimate sense of this operation is to explore his own feelings of loss and separation from both family and homeland. Through memories and dreams, Zanjir mythologises the concepts of absence and presence in a conversation of images, but also words, with the figure of Taj Saltaneh. The present continuously exists in the past and the past lives on in the present.