My works are my dreams

Introduction

The photographs of the Iranian artist Morteza Majidi are deeply poetic. They seek not to represent the world of surfaces, but to evoke the nature of interior experience through which reality is refracted. It is an approach that shares with Surrealism an interest in the phenomena of dreams. However, the Surrealists sought alternative realities through which to challenge the comfortable certainties of bourgeois rationalism by plumbing the unconscious. Majidi’s work takes a different course. He uses the syntax of dreams to reflect upon the nature of his life in a world in which he finds no place of safety. A world of personal solitude and echoing anxiety. Of denial of self. And he finds within his dreams a kind of haven denied to him in the wakeful world. There is no simple narrative here. No punctum to pierce the heart. Rather he deploys a visual poetics that avoids the fixity of words – a strategic ambiguity that draws the viewer into its empathic embrace.

Poetry is deeply woven into the fabric of Persian culture. For centuries it has constituted a reflection upon the values, hopes, and struggles in society. Threads of the poetic extend through religious discourse and political commentary, education and critique, and out into everyday conversation. This remains true today. It is said that in Iran every household possesses at least two books: the Quran and the work of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez. And, of course, the work of poets such as Rumi and Omar Khayyam are familiar to readers around the world. The influence of Persian poetry goes far beyond the enclaves of literature, it is deeply bound to the visual and the symbolic. Indeed, Daisy Lorenzi (a French writer currently resident in Iran) has observed that Persian poetry is one of the greatest iconographical powers across East and West. In her view, Iranian photography and cinema owe their quality and development to their antecedence in an exalted visual tradition that has organised Persian poetry since the tenth century.

Morteza Majidi’s photographs grow from this fertile cultural subsoil. His images embrace the poetic without seeking to illustrate a narrative of words. He speaks directly though the visual, suggesting complexity within a simple arrangement of objects, alienation through the filtering of daily denial. There is no room for reductive analysis here. Meaning is sensed through feeling. Knowledge sparked tangentially as the imagination rubs up against the cycle of unrequited longing.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

What first drew you to photography as a medium of personal expression?

My introduction to art was through cinema. Studying film history, from the silent era to the advent of sound, allowed me to connect with the deep roots of this medium, a form of cinema characterised by profound and poetic imagery. My exploration of film history led me to quickly move away from mainstream cinema and focus on artistic films. Following my interest in cinema, I explored painting and then photography. I initially aspired to be a painter, but after discovering photography, I sought to express my passion for painting through this new medium.

In what way?

Photography is the only medium through which I can fully express my passion for painting and visual art. Cinema has also profoundly influenced my perspective on photography, stemming from my habit of repeatedly watching and analysing scenes from significant films throughout cinema history. These cinematic scenes deeply imprinted themselves on my visual memory, and whenever I photograph, I subconsciously reference them, adapting them to the specific context. Furthermore, I value that photography is the creation of a single individual who maintains complete artistic control over every stage of the process, from initial concept to final execution.

[Left] © Morteza Majidi – untitled image from the series ‘Portrait of a Poet’ 2004
[Right] © Morteza Majidi – untitled image from the series ‘Elderliness’ 2021

What is it you seek to visualise in your imagery?

The Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli [1855–1912] said: “The dream is the infinite shadow of the true”. For me, a photograph can be like a dream. The less it tells you, the more you try to know.

My works are my dreams.

Each morning, after I wake up, I draw my dreams in a notebook. After collecting my dreams, I go out to look for a suitable location. Once I have found it, I make many changes, rearranging things to more precisely mirror my dream. Then I make my photograph.

While I name each suite of images, I do not name individual works because I do not want to limit their meaning to the circle of my mind – to the things of which I am myself conscious. I believe in duality and ambiguity in art, because I want each piece of art to evoke different visions and reactions as it touches different tastes. Once I have completed an artwork and put it on the wall, it no longer belongs to me. That image now exists and finds its meaning in direct relation to the viewer. I really like this aspect of art very much because the audience may see things in my work that I didn’t think about when I was creating it, but which were flowing from deep within my subconscious.

Poetry is highly regarded in Persian culture. How has this influenced you in your artmaking?

The profound value of Persian literature is undeniable. Yet for me, poetry lies in the way I perceive things with my eyes – how people and objects are arranged within a space, a landscape. For an artist and a photographer, a poetic vision is expressed in their engagement with people and things. This perspective, this sense of poetry, isn’t derived solely from texts; it arises from years of visual contemplation and reflection.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled images from the series ‘Portrait of a Poet’ 2004

The first series I would like to discuss is called, appropriately enough, ‘Portrait of a Poet’. How did this work begin?

It first began to crystallise after reading my brother Mostafa’s poetry. I felt a profound resonance between his verses and my personal experience, and it was this that inspired me. His poems drew me along through hidden vistas of the soul that provided me with a way to begin to portray my own sense of solitude.

As I read his poems, my thoughts and emotions intertwined with my brother’s poetry. They aroused feelings within me that took shape as they merged with my personal perspective. This was not simply about conscious intention. Throughout this process, neither my subconscious nor my soul remained detached – they, too, were subtly yet profoundly present. I resolved to loose my mind from all preconceptions and, like a poet, strip my soul within the boundless span of nature. The figure moves though unknown and unnamed places – both aware and unaware – entering into discourse with him. It is work in which I sought to project simplicity and surrealism in the light of the mind’s landscapes.

This body of work is a delicate tapestry woven from my dreams and experiences, and the lingering impressions of my brother’s poetry. It tells the story of a literary poet through a poetic visual language. His pen is his voice; my camera, my own.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled images from the series ‘Theatre of Solitude’ 2019

Tell me about the ‘Theatre of Solitude’. What inspired this work and what did you seek to express through the resulting images?

Reflecting now on this work, I realise that I have, in a way, approached and interpreted Shakespeare’s famous words through a unique lens: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. However, in my interpretation, the actors are inanimate objects, staged in a solitary, lifeless performance that reflects my own once-tumultuous soul, now calmed in stillness.

It began with a dream in which I saw a hand behind the door amid an emptiness that lay somewhere between being and nonbeing… The rest of the play I had to write myself. I determined to make a drama with images, and images alone. It has no beginning nor end, and loneliness is its unique and distinct theme.

Loneliness can both fill your being and also empty it of need. The hands are my tongue, and my eyes are the empty scene where things sit in harmonic discourse where every picture is a note, pleasing to the heart and the ear. I call this the music of silence. Silence is not simplicity. Silence ascends the stair of words that the eye hears, and the ears behold.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled image from the series ‘When Sleep Awakens Me’ 2016

In ‘When Sleep Awakens Me’ you introduce a female figure…

This work arose from days and nights of sleepwalking. As I dreamt, the nameless lady in a white dress took me out of my darkened room and into the span of light and nature; to blind rooms and deaf walls with which she sits to talk. She dims my eyes so that only with the pen of my camera can I inscribe my white dreams upon the grey arc of slumber. When awake, you do not dream but still the dream sees you, and you keep telling yourself: someone is always watching behind the door.

Who or what does the female figure represent?

She is, in fact, myself. Dreams are the only realm that requires no passport and recognises no gender – they are boundless. She is a vessel – a means through which I explore and reveal the hidden corners of my own soul. A means though which I could begin to portray my dreams of another way of being. In fact, I feel that all of my works are two kinds of self-portrait: of the male as object, and of the male as female. In the realm of dreams, gender dissolves and everything carries within it the seed of its opposite.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled images from the series ‘When Sleep Awakens Me’ 2016

The world of my dreams is born from the intertwining of black and white. White is the colour of dreams, and darkness embodies the weight of pain. These two exist in constant tension, locked in conflict – it is my restless soul that gives form to this struggle.

Why are dreams important to you as an artist?

An artist lives on two things: dreams and creation. A dream for an artist is what the heart is to the body. Life without dreams is like a body in a coffin. We are alive to dream – to give form to those dreams – so that we don’t perish from overwhelming despair. Through dreams, people learn how to stay hopeful. Life without dreams is unbearable for someone like me. Dreams are a sanctuary I retreat to when darkness presses in. The peace they offer is unlike anything else in this world.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled image from the series ‘Elderliness’ 2021

Tell me about ‘Elderliness’. What brings you to consider this subject when you are not yourself yet old?

Sometimes, a person grows old while they are still young. This aging has nothing to do with wrinkles beneath the eyes or strands of grey hair. Old age is a phase in life that, for some artists, arrives early. At times, I feel as though I never had a childhood. This sense of age, of weariness, has been with me for as long as I can remember. My generation never truly knew what it meant to be children.

This collection of images is my response to a question: What is the unexpected whiteness of old age like? Does it exist? Here, white contrasts with grey. The white chair of the aged, inverted circles of sorrow, the wrinkled walls; troubled cracks of grief and dread and flight. These pictures are the daily journals of a lifetime recording the white upon the page of black, which fades till it is no more.

But the truth remains – we never had a childhood.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled images from the series ‘Elderliness’ 2021

The final bodies of work I would like to discuss – ‘Implosion’ and ‘Transfiguration’ – have a different visual aesthetic from those we have been discussing. How do you see the relationship between these more abstracted colour images and the black-and-white work?

These two series are the closest my work has come to painting. In both, my camera functions like a painter’s brush. I stepped away from black and white to embrace colour and my photographic palette has expanded.

While these two series differ from each other, both revolve thematically around solitude. Although people appear together in some images, ultimately loneliness prevails. In the end, everything dissipates like smoke into the air – only the image endures.

© Morteza Majidi – untitled images from the series ‘Implosion’ 2016–19

What were you exploring in the series called ‘Implosion’?

A journey into the hidden corners of my soul and the re-creation of myself. It felt as if I had embarked on new act of self-creation. These astonished eyes and innocent colours, anonymous placeless faces, all bore premonitions of an imminent falling apart. It was as if I was metamorphosing from within. Yet, not even in the self-portraits did I dare to gaze at the injury ahead. Terror of the future just made me more self-absorbed. Where will it lead; where will it end…? I felt myself unknown and the space unnamed.

It seemed as if I had cast off all and was now seated at the place of judgement. Colours judge me and eyes gaze on me in pity, ever repeating:

I am pregnant of a body
injured by a shirt
reckless pillars
that overwhelm the air
and rope that is looped
before the grin.

I find it so affecting the way, when you speak about your work, your words echo the poetic expression of your photographs. It’s new to me in quite such an intense form, and I find it deeply moving to sense the life within those harmonics…

© Morteza Majidi – untitled images from the series ‘Transformation’ 2016–21

This brings me to the final body of work I would like to explore: ‘Transformation’.

In this work I wanted to use a Polaroid camera in a new way. I wanted to intervene in the process, to set these static faces and figures in motion in order to portray the nature of the artist’s complex and multifaceted inner world. I did this by reimagining the captured images from the information in the chemical residue on the negative. The forms originally caught in the polaroid remain entrapped within this abstraction, yet without them these images would seem confused, meaningless. They are transformed but they are not lost.

What have you learned about yourself while making these bodies of work?

In all the series I’ve worked on since the beginning, I’ve portrayed the silence of my soul – a soul that stands in a corner, observing the isolation and destruction of humanity. This wounded and trampled soul gazes silently, never forgetting human suffering.

And what I have learned is that art is the only refuge where, for a brief moment, one can escape the banality of the world and find solace.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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