Matter of Days

Galleri Format, Malmö

In 2001, Shirin Sabahi, a high school student, was introduced to analogue photography. For a portrait assignment she took pictures of Eli, her little cousin, on a family holiday in the countryside. In 2016, Sabahi the artist, took snapshots of Mount Fuji. On a flight just outside Mexico City in 2021, she captured a landscape that was once Lake Texcoco. In 2023 she photographed a mermaid statue in Okinawa, and that same year she took a blind deer’s headshot.

Taken over a time span of two decades these images seem unrelated, yet they are connected via spatial and temporal cross-references, teasing out the interconnectedness of time, memory, and chance. This theme resonates throughout the exhibition, making use of the photographic record’s potential to bridge past and present.

At Galleri Format the storefront windows are covered, partially blocking daylight from the exhibition space. The windows are perforated by a rhythmic, geometric shape, evoking the taped windows during wars, typhoon seasons, and in earthquake-prone regions. To this day, citizens in crises use this technique as protection against shattering glass. On her first trip to Japan, Sabahi saw this pattern again and was reminded of similar patterns on Tehran’s windows in the 1980s.

Crossing the magenta threshold, Eli (Zenit EM) is the first image you encounter. As one of the early photographs the artist took, it symbolises a genesis in Sabahi’s artistic trajectory. The motif recurs in different arrangements of analogue prints. While all variations depict the same moment, each iteration is imbued with its own significance, shaped by time and formal composition. The video Lung, also playing in this room, explores similar questions: How does the moment relate to the process? Shot as a single take video on an unattended camera, it documents the slow deflation of an air dome, until the camera’s memory card is full.

Transitioning into the second room, there is a projection installation titled At the Guesthouse. Here too, the exploration of timing and the proceeding of time continues. The film includes scenes from Sabahi’s first trip to Japan and the country’s inevitable symbol Mt. Fuji, seen from various distances and directions. These views are contrasted with 16mm film recordings from a recent trip, staying the night at the house of a friend of a friend, an architect, in a villa along the Sagami Bay. She thinks she will see the volcano again. However, unforeseen weather conditions disrupt this plan. Filming outside is made difficult by a storm that rages, confining her indoors and prompting interior reflections on the space’s history. The house exudes a peculiar aura, built shortly after World War II it once belonged to Horace Bristol, an American photojournalist known mainly for his work for LIFE magazine. Stationed in Japan, Bristol documented post-WWII Japan and the Korean War. He moved with his family to this fishing village south of Tokyo and together with a local carpenter built a series of houses on a cliff facing the bay. The photographer, in a country ravaged by the US nuclear bombs, likely grappled with forging a local connection; within the house, a palpable sense of alienation prevails.

These threads and fragments converge within the film through a non-linear montage, accompanied by a soundtrack that evokes disharmony. The magenta light, dispersed throughout the gallery space, stimulates similar feelings of alert. Due to its high visibility, magenta is used in aviation and military cartography to demarcate off-limit zones. The fuchsia dye, discovered in the 19th century, was soon renamed magenta, after a battlefield in the city of Magenta in Italy.

Conflict undertones other images too: Lake Texcoco depicts a water treatment facility, located in the valley of Mexico. The lake was drained in the 15th century by the Spanish conquerors, in false hope of cultivating agricultural land. Today, this area is a state-run ecological park with a restoration objective. In Matter of Days, spaces haunted by both natural and artificial crises intersect. Revisiting the artist’s photographic routes, we are invited to traverse these spectral realms.

- Veronika Epple