Jacob Church and Aghigh Afhkami present Mundane Fires, a dialogue between two ongoing photography projects, Afhkami’s Ecdysis and Church’s Strange Fires. Ecdysis, the act of shedding becomes a metaphor for a psychological rupture: a slow, painful transformation in which the self is no longer recognizable, and surroundings and memories merge. Strange Fires seeks to pose questions about the complicated relationship between community and individuals and how our built environment serves as a sort of language, communicating at once a community’s values, desires, and disenfranchisement. Together the works exchange reflections of place, identity, transformation, and memory.


Aghigh Afkhami (b. 1996, Tehran; based in Boston) is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, video, and bookmaking. Her practice explores memory, resilience, and fragmentation through narrative and sequencing. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Afkhami’s photobooks Salakhi (2024, with Amir Esfandiari) and Stress (2024) have been presented at international art book fairs including Miss Read (Berlin) and the LA Art Book Fair (Los Angeles). Her work has been exhibited in Iran, the United States, and the UAE, and she was a finalist in the 19th Arte Laguna Prize (Venice).



Jacob Church is a photographer born in Bowling Green, Ohio. Church’s images are exposed and kept in the dark for sometime, creating space between the fiction of the occurrence as it lives in his memory and the fact of the latent image. His work has been exhibited at Panopticon gallery in Boston, MA and at La Grange in Vers Pont du Gard, France. His photographs have been featured in Pearl Press, Oranbeg Press, Lenscratch, and Fotofilmic.