Mina Hassani

Mina Hassani is a conceptual artist whose practice engages with themes of memory, collective memory, trauma, mourning, embodiment, and forgetting. Working primarily with hand-printmaking and alternative photographic processes, she has developed a substantial body of work through printmaking. For Hassani, print is not merely a means of reproducing an image; it is a way of summoning and narrating—of bringing something back into presence, again and again, while opening up different conceptual dimensions of the subject at hand. Her background in literature has also made storytelling a central element of her practice.

The three works presented by Mins as part of the Continuum initiative, as their title suggests, address the stillness and perpetual suspension of a figure within the frame of a photograph—originally a family photograph—and explore the shifting conditions of the subject’s presence and absence within space. The residual colors of gum bichromate and cyanotype, together with the figure’s indistinctness, evoke the nature of memory: a memory sufficiently clear to retain details, yet sufficiently blurred for those details to elude precision; a memory always vulnerable to alteration, in which the original subject may gradually disappear from the frame and slip into forgetting. Within this tension, Hassani approaches presence and absence not as opposing states, but as two sides of the same condition. The figure’s presence already contains the trace of its future absence, while absence is never entirely empty: it preserves traces of a former presence—in color, in blurring, and in the residue of exposure—on the surface of the frame. The family photograph thus becomes a threshold, a space in which the figure is neither fully present nor entirely gone, but suspended between remembering and forgetting. Yet the work extends beyond the memory of a family photograph and the presence and absence of a blood relative. In particular, the principal figure in one of the works has been deliberately rendered to evoke a face that, for many Iranians, has become an iconic and unforgettable image: Khodanour. Hassani heightens this association through a considered interplay of vertical lines, bringing the resemblance more insistently to the surface of the image. The lines, alongside the figure, seem to facilitate an act of recognition while simultaneously summoning the collective memory attached to this face. The presence of the sea and water further intensifies this association.

Water holds a fundamental place in Hassani’s practice. It is witness, testimony, and narrator; at times, within these works, it becomes an extension of the artist herself, assuming the role of witness and narrator to what has happened to the figure. Presence and absence therefore emerge not as opposing conditions, but as two sides of the same coin. As the figure fades, the landscape and water—despite their own fluidity and continual transformation—assume its place as witnesses, bearing a record of the figure’s having been there. Absence, in Hassani’s work, is thus not the negation of presence, but its inverted form: not the end of the narrative, but another way in which the narrative persists.