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 were part of the visual landscape in which I grew up. Over time, they have moved beyond their original contexts to become embedded within a shared psychological landscape.
The work considers how collective memory takes shape through such images. Our relationship to historical events is often formed not through direct experience, but through photographs that are seen and circulated until they begin to stand in for the events themselves. As these images travel across time and generations, their meanings shift. Some come to carry something beyond the events they depict, returning to us in different moments with meanings that history continues to reshape.
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, a narrow vertical line of light moves slowly across each work, recalling the scanning process through which a physical image is read and translated into information. Yet 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.
Anamnesis considers the forms in which the past 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
