Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish by Mashid Mohadjerin

Mashid Mohadjerin’s work is an intricate tapestry of personal and collective memory, weaving together photography, text, video, and archival material to explore themes of displacement, resistance, and identity.

Exhibition at the FOMU

In Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), she draws from the depths of her family history, unraveling the echoes of migration, forced departures, and the quiet endurance of those caught between worlds. The book builds on her previous work, Freedom is Not Free (2021), where she explored the role of women in movements of resistance across the MENA region. However, in this latest series, she turns her gaze towards the intersection of masculinity, political ideology, and displacement, examining how historical forces shape personal narratives in ways both visible and unseen.

Mohadjerin’s work challenges conventional notions of storytelling by collapsing time and space, merging past and present in fluid, evocative sequences. In her narrative, history is not linear—it is cyclical, looping back on itself, carried through generations like a whisper that never fully fades.

She reconstructs the past not as a distant realm but as something tangible, living within language, inherited trauma, and memory. The presence of her ancestors—scholars, exiles, believers, and revolutionaries—haunts her work, their choices reverberating through time. Whether she speaks of the dervish’s grief in the mosque, the execution of the Báb, or her father’s reluctant exile, her storytelling carries a poetic weight, blending the deeply personal with the grand sweep of history. This layered approach allows her to engage with themes of exile and belonging in a way that is both intimate and politically urgent.

The tension between imposed identity and self-definition is at the heart of Mohadjerin’s exploration of masculinity in Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish. Through visual and textual fragments, she examines how masculinity has been shaped by war, colonialism, nationalism, and the rigid structures of religious ideology. The book traces how manhood has been weaponized, used as a tool to uphold power structures, and at times, violently policed. This is not just a historical inquiry; it is deeply personal. Through the lens of her father’s memories, she reveals how even the simplest acts—refusing to recite a prayer, seeking refuge, losing a homeland—become acts of quiet defiance. Her work does not offer easy resolutions; rather, it invites readers to sit with the discomfort of contradiction, to recognize that resistance does not always look like rebellion, and that exile is both a state of being and a psychological inheritance.

Ultimately, Mohadjerin’s work is an act of reclamation. In a world where displacement often erases identities, she reassembles the fragments, creating space for alternative narratives that challenge dominant historical accounts. Her storytelling is not just about loss—it is about survival, about carrying forward the echoes of those who came before while refusing to be defined by the constraints of the past. Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish is both a personal meditation and a political statement, illuminating the ways in which history is carried within the body, the landscape, and the unspoken silences between generations.

Through her multidisciplinary approach, she creates a body of work that is not only about witnessing but about reimagining—offering a vision of the past and present that is fluid, complex, and deeply human.