Description
We’re alive to not rest, but to strive.
We’re waves, yet if still, we won’t survive
-Saeb-e-Tabrizi, 16th-17th-century Persian poet
There exist turbulent waves between me and the island of Hengam, each referring to a brief moment. Every time they are born, I seem to witness their disappearance. In the same way as a moment, every time I approach one, I am simultaneously moving away from it. The essence of the island and its seclusion, nonetheless, gives space to my solitude as well as its new guests to experience a touch of relief in those transient split seconds.
Hengam (meaning moment in English, Persian: هنگام) is an island that covers an area of approximately 50 square kilometers in the south of Iran and the Persian Gulf. The island hosts nature tourists, often young people who want to escape or seek self-confrontation; they camp together for a few days or weeks in every nook and cranny of nature, away from all the social constraints back in cities. For them, Hengam, with its warm sunshine and temperate climate, is like a safe haven and shelter in which to experience a communal life, regardless of the common and traditional patterns of contemporary Iranian lifestyle. They seem to have become integrated and enclosed with hope and expectation in Iranian society's social and cultural context, which is fragmented like an island, observing all the comings and goings between the past, present, and the future.
In the meanwhile, the natives of Hengam Island have moved from Minab, a city in southern Iran in the same province, to settle there, and throughout the past few decades, they have replaced the former Arab inhabitants of the island. The latter lived there for centuries but were expelled due to political changes in different historical periods and migrated to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
In this ongoing project, a variety of cameras and photographic film formats, often outdated, have been used.