Anamnesis
Anamnesis is a growing archive that considers how images persist within collective memory, shaping our relationship to events long after their immediate historical moment has passed.
The series draws on found photographs of events that have profoundly shaped the lived experience of my generation in Iran following the Iranian Revolution. Images of events such as the Iran hostage crisis, widely circulated and repeatedly encountered, have gradually moved beyond their original contexts to become embedded within a shared psychological landscape.
The work considers how collective memory is constructed through such images. Unlike personal memory, which is rooted in lived experience, our understanding of historical events is often mediated by photographs that, through repetition and circulation, come to stand in for the events themselves. Their significance is not fixed: as they travel across time, contexts, and generations, they accumulate associations and emotional weight, influencing not only what is remembered, but how the past is imagined.
I intervene in these photographs during their re-formation, using controlled exposures to light to disrupt their legibility. Areas dissolve, figures partially disappear, and visual information is interrupted before the image can fully resolve. In their presentation, light assumes another role. A narrow vertical line moves slowly across each work, recalling the scanning process through which a physical image is read and translated into information. Here, however, the promise of retrieval remains incomplete: the light reveals only what it encounters, momentarily bringing portions of the image into view before they recede again.
The image is therefore never fully available. Its encounter unfolds through time, between recognition and disappearance, while the viewer continually assembles what can only be partially recovered.
Rather than reconstructing the past, Anamnesis considers the forms in which it survives—how images remain active within us, carrying histories forward even as their meanings are transformed.
Installation visualization:
Each work: 180 × 130 cm
Translucent photographic prints presented in aluminum lightboxes, each with a moving linear light that travels horizontally across the image
Anamnesis, New York, 2025-26 © Tooraj Khamenehzadeh