(capsules) Atefeh Majidi Nezhad & Joana Duarte

At this year’s edition of Luxembourg Art Week, you are both presenting at Capsules. What are you showing there?

Atefeh: I am presenting Revision: Zero-G Columns, part of my Columns Series. The installation consists of suspended columns whose forms come from the architecture of the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan. Freed from their load-bearing role, they lose their historical weight and solidity and become light, transparent and weightless. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, writes about space as a place of reverie and daydreaming, and this is close to what I want here. The columns no longer hold up a ceiling or stand as symbols of authority. They float, and invite the audience to rethink weight, space and memory.

What is your personal relation to the Jameh Mosque?
Isfahan is my birthplace, and its visual and spatial memory is part of my everyday life. For me, the Jameh Mosque and the space around the Taj al-Molk Dome are not just historical monuments. They are part of the lived experience of the people of this city, so rooted in local culture and habits that the space seems to renew itself through human life. Christian Norberg-Schulz described place as more than physical geography, as something that shapes human identity and memory. My relationship with this architecture is neither only intellectual nor only aesthetic. It is a sense of origin. These columns belong to my visual unconscious, and working with them is a way of re-reading my personal memory inside a collective history.

Your columns take up this architecture, but in a very different material. How did you arrive at the shift from brick to net fabric and ink?
Brick is solid, heavy and final. By moving to net fabric and ink, I did not want to erase the architecture, but to free it from its physical mass. The change of material lets me keep a “ghost image” of the structure: the form is still recognizable, but it becomes transparent, open and light. Brick encloses space, while net and ink let space flow through the form. The structure changes from a solid reality into a fluid recollection.

Joana, your work also lets something solid become fragile. What are you presenting?
I am presenting New Images From the Past, an installation of family photographs placed inside transparent boxes filled with a chemical solution. The images slowly dissolve over the course of the exhibition, so the work is constantly changing. These photographs come from my own family archive, from a history marked by domestic violence, silence and conflicting versions of what happened.

Each installation destroys original photographs. How do you decide which ones to let dissolve?
I often start with photographs that seem very ordinary. I am not necessarily looking for the most dramatic moments or the images that tell the clearest story. A photograph can look completely harmless, but something about it starts to feel strange when I spend more time with it. Its meaning can also change depending on what I remember about it, or how I see it years later. So the selection is quite intuitive.

It seems both of your works take forms that once carried authority, the photograph as evidence, the column as a symbol of power, and let them become fragile. What does it mean for you to undo that authority through material?
Joana: Undoing the authority of the family photograph also means bringing it back to its material reality. We tend to treat photographs as evidence, as if they contained some kind of truth, but physically they are just paper and chemicals. By dissolving the photo, I am questioning not only what the image tells us, but also what gives it that authority in the first place. Once it starts breaking down, you are forced to see it as a material object rather than unquestionable evidence. And perhaps what we believe about the past can then be questioned too.

Atefeh: When a familiar form loses some of its physical certainty, the mind has to read it again. I am interested in the moment when a form looks temporary, fragile and open to new interpretations. Simple changes in weight, transparency or scale help me break our usual relationship with authoritative structures. Something that seemed unshakeable becomes unstable and starts to ask questions.

Joana, you speak of a “controlled undoing”. What kind of authority did these photographs hold for you?
For me, that authority was very literal. These photographs were presented as evidence of what my family was, and therefore of what had happened and who I was. At some point, I was also made to doubt my own memories, so the photograph could feel more trustworthy than my own experience. It seemed to say: “This happened, these people were happy, this was your family.” The photograph can show that a moment existed, but it cannot tell me everything that happened around it. By dissolving the image, I am questioning its ability to stand in for the whole story.

And Atefeh, your columns no longer carry any weight. Is that a critique of power, or also a gesture of care?
When a column is freed from its supporting role, its nature and its relation to space change completely. It stops being an authoritative structural element and becomes a form open to new readings, a move from structural function to conceptual possibility. As Jacques Derrida noted, deconstruction is not simple destruction, but a way of reading that lets overlooked meanings appear. In the same way, suspending the columns is both a questioning of the power of solid architecture and an act of care. It rescues the form from the burden of use, so it can breathe and meet the viewer freely.

Letting a form breathe also means letting something go. Is disappearance in your work primarily a loss, or can it also be an opening?

Joana: There is a lot of loss. But that same loss allows for transformation. Once the photograph is no longer there to dictate what happened, it feels truly liberating. Working through this process has helped me understand that I don’t have to preserve an image to acknowledge it. Keeping photographs untouched in a drawer for years is also a kind of disappearance: they are preserved, but completely disconnected from the present. The disappearance in my work is an active one. It opens up possibilities to relate to the past differently.

Atefeh: Disappearance does carry a sense of loss, but this loss is never a complete end. When a form is absent, space opens up and there is room for something new. Maurice Blanchot, who thought deeply about absence, reminds us that disappearing is not simply the end of being. In my work, disappearance clears away certainties. The viewer meets not what has vanished, but the possibilities that appear after it.

Joana, alongside the boxes you also show an enlarged vinyl print of one of the immersed images. Why double an image that is already disappearing?
The image is being destroyed and reproduced at the same time. My process is very much about documentation, so even when I destroy a photograph, I don’t let its disappearance go undocumented. The print makes that contradiction visible. It looks more permanent, but it is a reproduction of something that no longer exists. I think that says a lot about our strange relationship with photographs: even when we want to let go of them, we keep finding ways to preserve them.

Preserving is also a way of remembering. One of you works with a private family archive, the other with collective, historical architecture. How do you see the relation between personal and collective memory?

Joana: What is more collective than family? It is usually the first thing we learn. I start from my own archive because it is what I know, but a personal story can open onto something much broader, just as we connect with a documentary through one person’s story. In my work, the specific story of my family becomes a way to talk about domestic violence, silence and the ways families collectively decide what is remembered. The personal is often where the collective becomes most visible.

Atefeh: I don’t think personal and collective memory are separate. Personal memory is woven into collective memory, and for me, architecture is where the two meet. A building or a city may belong to a shared history, yet our experience of it is personal, sensory and intimate. Juhani Pallasmaa, in The Eyes of the Skin, writes about architecture as something we feel through the whole body. A family archive and historical architecture are two sides of the same coin: one tells memory on an intimate scale, the other on a large one.

Both of your installations keep changing. How much control do you keep in your process, and where do you let the material take over?
Joana: I am quite controlling in my process, so I think a lot about where I can give that control up. I choose materials and techniques that don’t allow me to fully control the outcome. Once the photographs are placed in the chemical solution, I can decide the conditions, but not exactly how each image will dissolve. From then on, the work continues to change without me, and time becomes part of the material itself. The installation is not only something to look at, but something that is continuously happening.

Atefeh: I usually begin with a clear structure, but I never want the result to be only an answer to my first plan. For me, making is a conversation. At some point, the material answers back and offers behaviors I could not have predicted. And the work keeps changing after it leaves my hands, with the viewer’s position, the light, the surrounding architecture. Umberto Eco described this as the open work, a “work in movement” completed by each viewer. No two encounters with it are the same.

Instability runs through both of your works. Do you see them as a response to the present, to narratives and structures we once considered fixed?
Joana: I do think there is a return to the idea of the family as something unbreakable, and I find those old “family values” worrying, especially when they come with patriarchal ideas about what a family should look like and how people within it should behave. What does it actually mean to protect the family? Sometimes it means protecting the people in it, but it can also mean protecting its hierarchies, its secrets and the things that are not allowed to be said. Family photographs are often used to prove belonging and togetherness, but they can also help protect that image when reality is much more complicated.

Atefeh: A structure or a story can lose its rigidity and authority without completely collapsing. It becomes more fragile, more fluid and open to many readings. My response to the present is not a direct picture of instability. I try to create conditions in which the idea of stability itself becomes uncertain. This feels close to Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity”, a world in which things that once seemed solid keep melting.

Let’s talk about Capsules. How did you approach the idea of showing your work in a storefront window?
Joana: I was interested in the contradiction of putting something so private into a storefront. These images usually belong to very intimate spaces, and here they are placed behind glass and exposed to people passing by. The window is not a neutral display space either. The street, the light and the reflections become part of how the photographs are seen. So the work is both showing the images and making them harder to see. That tension between exposure and disappearance felt very appropriate.

Atefeh: A storefront window is a transparent, living threshold. The work stays connected to everyday life and the rhythm of the city, fully visible, yet constantly changing with reflections, street light and what happens around it. Walter Benjamin wrote about the arcades as thresholds between inside and outside, between dream and city life, and this idea is close to my choice. The work is not isolated behind white gallery walls. It enters a dialogue with the city.

And what kind of encounter do you imagine for passersby who don’t expect to see art there?
Atefeh: I don’t expect passersby to decode the ideas behind the work. What matters to me is a small break in the rushed rhythm of the day: a moment of pause, hesitation and thought. I want the work to be not a quick answer, but a reason to stop, look again and question what seemed fixed. Jacques Rancière argues that art can change what we are able to see and feel. For a short time, the passerby stops being a passive consumer and becomes an active viewer.

Joana: I like the idea that people might encounter the work without being prepared for it. They are walking past a storefront, and suddenly they are looking at someone else’s family photographs. There is something slightly uncomfortable about that. The viewer becomes implicated simply by looking, trying to make sense of people and relationships they don’t know. In a way, they are doing what we always do with images: filling in the gaps and constructing a story from what we can see.

You both mentioned the reflections of the street. How does the shift between day and night change your installations?
Joana: I think of light, shadow and reflection as part of the material conditions of the work. During the day, the photographs are mixed with the street: you see reflections of people, cars, buildings, and sometimes yourself on top of the images. At night, the glass becomes much darker and the photographs become more isolated, almost like objects suspended in the window.

Atefeh: I can control the materials in my work, but light, shadow and reflection are alive and unpredictable. Day and night give the work two different identities. In Persian architecture, natural light is never still. It moves across surfaces and gives space a feeling of time. Louis Kahn wrote, “I sense light as the giver of all presences.” During the day, street reflections and natural light connect the work to the pulse of the city and reveal the transparency of the net. At night, the reflections fade, and the light from inside turns it into a floating sculpture in the dark.

How does the context of Luxembourg City shape the way you think about the work?
Atefeh: For me, showing this work in Luxembourg is not only a change of place, but a spatial and semantic displacement. The columns carry the memory of one specific origin, and in Luxembourg they meet a very different urban and architectural landscape. Edward Said wrote about how ideas change as they travel into new contexts. When a familiar form is moved to a new place, its meaning does not stay the same. The work stops being only a “local monument” and becomes an in-between form, between the memory of its origin and the reality of its destination.

Joana: Being in Luxembourg makes me think more about migration and what happens to family stories when they move between places. I come from Portugal and live in the Netherlands, so carrying a family history somewhere else is not unfamiliar to me. Knowing that Luxembourg has a large Portuguese community adds another layer, but I don’t think the work needs to be read through that lens. Once the photographs are shown elsewhere, they start to exist outside of my own history. I find that distance interesting, because I don’t know what people will recognize in them or what they will bring to them.

Finally, what do you hope stays with viewers?
Atefeh: Not a clear message, but a sensation, a pause, an experience. I want viewers to feel a structure that looks familiar and solid at first, but slowly reveals an unstable quality, and to see how a form changes as they move and as time passes. Susan Sontag wrote that we must learn “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” For me, the best result is a quiet hesitation that stays with viewers after they leave and makes them look at the structures and certainties around them with a little more openness.

Joana: Connection. I’m always amazed when people project their own stories onto my work. After all, everyone has some kind of family tension in their lives. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be the uncle you always argue with at the Christmas table, or something that was never talked about. I don’t expect people to know my story. I appreciate that they can bring their own to it.

Discover 

Atefeh Majidi Nezhad's (capsule) | Joana Duarte's (capsule)