Persia Reference: Azadeh Akhlaghi; By An Eye-Witness

Azadeh Akhlaghi

Born in 1978, in Shiraz Azadeh Akhlaghi studied computer science at RMIT University. She is a conceptual artist who began her career in 2001. Akhlaghi’s main concerns are photography, video-arts and short movies. Akhlaghi’s practice acknowledges conceptual approaches to contemporary art through photography. She has made a number of short films which have been screened in numerous film festivals such as the Berkeley Art Museum, Pusan and Oslo. From 2001 to 2010 Akhlaghi has participated in numerous art exhibitions ranging from such countries as Iran, Australia, England to Turkey. Akhlaghi has also won a number of international prizes including the third prize of the UN Habitat Photography Competition and the first prize of the Women and Urban Life Competition of Iran. (From Galley MAMAK)

In her project By An Eye-Witness, Akhlaghi photographically reconstructs the death stories of a number of significant Iranian personalities. These figures include influential politicians, journalists, writers, and sports celebrities. The following passage has been written by Azadeh Akhlaghi about By An Eye-Witness.

"Is it possible for a moment in present time to become so tumultuous and critical to break the linearity of time, bring the past to the present and thrust the dwellers of the present to the past? Is it possible that we come upon a radical opening in the course of history, through which the spirit of those who fought and died tragically for a common cause, walk alongside us shoulder-to-shoulder in the streets of our contemporary cities? Is it viable that a human being, doomed to the present time, takes the spirits of his precursors out of the massive ruins of history, call them on to the present, and relishes their precious support?

How about the opposite way? Is this extraordinary moment a new possibility to move on for us? Is it possible that we, in the heat of the moment, manage to detach from the triviality of our everyday life and travel back through history? A journey backward, not through memory or mind or analysis or reading or writing, but through our very flesh and blood, which seems profoundly attached to the moment?

The point of departure of this project derives from the shock – a collective shock – of the present, rather than a historical preoccupation and is a meditation on those possibilities. Perhaps what I bring to the fore is nothing but utopic daydreaming, one of those candid optimistic moments that come around during abrupt social cracks and collective hopes. This is perhaps imagining simultaneity of us and the dead we admire in an essentially different time, the time that is yet to come."

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