Blood Was Flowing Across the Shop Floor

This project was developed through a collaboration with artist Masoud Momenha, initiated while he was based in Tehran and I was living in New York. Momenha’s project, titled Having Been There, was conceived as a means to realize a collective exhibition under conditions in which direct presence and mobility were constrained. He invited a selected group of Iranian artists and photographers living outside Iran to propose sites, situations, or images they wished to capture inside the country.

While Momenha was physically present at the selected locations, the participating artists directed the act of photographing from a distance. Through remote communication, they framed and captured their chosen sites in real time, engaging with the camera’s view without being physically present. This process unsettled the conventional link between photographic authorship and bodily presence, introducing a mediated form of image-making shaped by distance, delegation, and intention. The photographs were later edited by the artists, allowing each work to retain an individual perspective.

My contribution to this collaboration was rooted in my personal experience of the Green Movement in Iran. Political pressure, censorship, and implicit threats profoundly shaped the conditions that constrained how artists could work, speak, and exhibit in relation to the movement. The project emerged within an atmosphere of caution, distance, and partial silence, in which indirect forms of address became not only necessary but meaningful.

All photographs were taken during twilight.

Blood Was Flowing Across the Shop Floor, Iran and USA, 2018 © Tooraj Khamenehzadeh