Talks: Amak Mahmoodian - Hunts Of Memory

Iranian-born and Bristol-based artist Amak Mahmoodian (Shortlisted, Time Magazine's Best Photobook of the Year 2016) has assembled a group of extraordinary photographic artists - Maria Kapajeva, Hanna Darabi, and Dragana Jurisic.

Together with facilitator Colin Pantall, these artists will discuss their practices, the relationship of artistic and documentary photography to place, and notions of resistance, identity, and memory.

Dragana Jurišic
Born in the former Yugoslavia and now living and working in Dublin, Dragana Jurišic received her PhD from the European Centre for Photographic Research in 2013. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales.

Working primarily with image, text, and video, she has shown her work extensively in Ireland and abroad and won numerous awards, including Golden Fleece Special Recognition Award, IMMA 1000 Residency Award and numerous bursaries and project awards. Her work is in many collections including National Gallery of Ireland, Arts Council Collection, and Irish State Art Collection. Her first book YU: The Lost Country received accolades worldwide. Her new book Museum, a collaboration with Paula Meehan, came out in July 2019.

Hannah Darabi
An Iranian artist born in 1981 in Tehran, Hannah Darabi studied photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran, and then at the University Paris VIII. Today based in Paris, her country of origin remains the main subject of most of her photographic series. In order to reveal the complex political situation of this country, she creates series in which her photographs interact with other materials, such as texts, archival images, or objects.

The artist's book occupies a privileged place among other forms of representation that she explores. Her books are part of public and private collections, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Kandinsky Library (Centre Pompidou, Paris), the BNF (National Library of France) and the Royal Library of Belgium (Brussels).

Maria Kapajeva
An Estonian artist, Kapajeva works in London, UK. In 2018, she won the Runner Up Award at FOKUS Video Art Festival, Denmark and in 2016, received a Gasworks and Triangle Network Fellowship to work at Kooshk Residency in Tehran. Maria's first artist book, You can call him another man is shortlisted for Aperture Photobook Award 2018.

Her work has been internationally exhibited, including most recently at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2019), CBS Digital Art Space (Denmark 2019), RIBOCA Biennial (Latvia, 2018), Kaunas Photography Gallery (Lithuania 2018), Narva Art Residency (Estonia 2017), WOAK Gallery (Poland 2017), Detroit Oloman Gallery (USA 2017). Her video work has been shown at Luminocity Festival (Canada 2018), NexT Film Festival (Romania, 2017), and Berlin Feminist Film Week (2016).

Since 2009, Kapajeva has taught in Higher Education and for the last 7 years, she has been working for the research project Fast Forward: Women in Photography. She is co-editor of online platform, www.fastforward.photography and curator of the @womeninphoto instagram. Kapajeva also curates an ongoing online project, One Image Story.

Amak Mahmoodian
Born in Shiraz and living in Bristol UK. In 2015, Mahmoodian completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales, having previously studied at the Art University of Tehran. The artist's work questions Western notions of identity, expressing personal stories that pertain to wider social issues which draw on her experiences in the Middle East, Asia and the West. Her previous project, Shenasnameh, has been widely exhibited internationall and the accompanying artist photobook won many awards and critical acclaim in publications as diverse as Time Magazine, Foam Magazine, and the Guardian.

Mahmoodian's new photobook, Zanjir, is due to be published by RRB Photobooks in November 2019.