Mashid Mohadjerin, Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish, 2025

In her monograph Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), Mashid draws deeply from her family history, revealing echoes of migration, forced departures, and the silent resistance of those caught between two worlds. The book builds on her previous work, Freedom is Not Free (2021), in which she explored the role of women in resistance movements in the MENA region. However, in this latest series, she turns her gaze to the intersection of masculinity, political ideology and displacement, examining how historical forces shape personal narratives in both visible and invisible ways.
She reconstructs the past not as a distant realm, but as something tangible, living in language, inherited trauma and memory. The presence of her ancestors—scholars, exiles, believers, and revolutionaries—hovers over her work, their choices echoing through time. Whether she is speaking of the pain of the dervish in the mosque, the execution of the Báb, or her father’s reluctant exile, her narrative has a poetic weight, blending the deeply personal with the grand sweep of history. This layered approach allows her to address the themes of exile and belonging in an intimate and politically urgent way.