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| At the Artists House in downtown Tehran, Parisa Abbasi’s Repair depicts a human figure fallen apart, with fragments scattered across the floor. Courtesy Najmeh Bozorgmehr and FT. |
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Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran,
FTA blackened, cracked and scorched canvas hangs in Artibition Art Gallery in Tehran, its Persian inscriptions emerging through layers of soot and ash. Burnt-out candles sit before it, wax spilled across the floor.
The two-panel painting by Mojtaba Amini reflects his experience at the height of the war, when US and Israeli strikes hit Tehran’s fuel depots on March 7, sending a dark cloud over the capital, followed by toxic rainfall. The text reads: “A black chador has covered the city’s sky . . . a woman with a bottle of mineral water washes a blackened cat . . . how ominous the colour black is.” Yet Amini’s darkness is not without an exit. “I know this darkness will subside.”
The painting is part of immutable, a group exhibition and one of dozens of shows, open studios and cultural events taking place across Tehran until September 11 as part of Tehran Art Month, intended to promote the city’s visual arts. It is the first event to bring together so many of Tehran’s galleries at a time when Iranian society is grappling with the trauma of two wars in the past year and bloody unrest in January, in which thousands were killed.
The works on display are not all about war, but the costs of conflict surface in damaged objects, anxiety and exhaustion, as well as private attempts to preserve a sense of continuity. Running through the event is a tension between acknowledging catastrophe and refusing to surrender to it.
“I’m still struggling with the collective mourning which has penetrated our souls,” says Nastaran Safaei, an established sculptor who held an open studio as part of the event and whose work is being shown in two galleries. “I’m still not sure I can start a new project. I have no energy. But I welcome any new initiative.”
The event has been put on by the city’s Art Galleries Association, a non-governmental organisation. Forty-five galleries, including Dastan’s Plus2, 009821 Projects and Homa, are participating under the motto “For People, For the City, For Art”, exhibiting in their own spaces. The programme also includes book exhibitions and other events intended to broaden the audience for contemporary art. It is an ambitious undertaking in a country whose visual-art ecosystem is both unusually sophisticated and unusually isolated.
“This art fair will not create a serious shock to the visual arts scene, nor are we seeking an immediate impact,” says Hossein Mohseni, director of Tehran Art Month and Artibition. “Rather, we are sowing the seeds of hope for long-term growth.”
For Mohseni, the coexistence of darkness and hope is not accidental. “There is no denial of reality; instead, there is an acknowledgment of the difficult circumstances,” he says. “The artworks reflect a period of mourning and the collective need to process this experience, with the hope of a better future.”
Iran’s contemporary art scene emerged as a significant force in the international market in the 2000s, when the opening of Christie’s Dubai branch helped connect artists from the region with collectors and institutions abroad. Iranian sculptor Parviz Tanavoli became the most expensive Middle Eastern artist at auction with his sculpture “The Wall (Oh, Persepolis)”, which sold at Christie’s in 2008 for approximately $2.84mn. A generation of Iranian artists subsequently found audiences through galleries, fairs, residencies and museums in the US, Europe and Asia.
The country’s contemporary art also draws heavily on a long cultural inheritance: Persian calligraphy and miniature painting, poetry and literature and carpet weaving. These ancient and enduring traditions have been absorbed into modernist and contemporary practices while political and social commentary is often encoded. Photography, painting, installation and video have given artists ways to examine a society negotiating revolution, war, religion, modernity, gender and rapid social change.
The visual art sector has been relatively insulated from direct government scrutiny, partly because it remains small and addresses a limited audience. But that lack of scale has become a structural weakness. The market is too small to sustain the full infrastructure needed for a mature visual art ecosystem and is unbalanced. There are numerous artists — perhaps more than any other country in the Middle East — but not enough dealers, collectors and buyers.
Tehran Art Month is an attempt, at least in part, to address that isolation. The event was originally planned for last year but was cancelled after the June attacks. There are no major commercial sponsors and participating galleries will not pay commission on sales.
At the Artists House, a popular cultural centre in downtown Tehran, the exhibition Out of Sight explores the extent to which international restrictions and economic pressure have cut Iranian art off from the global market. Some works are large-scale pieces that would struggle to find buyers within Iran. A sculpture by Parisa Abbasi depicts a human figure torn apart, its fragments scattered across the floor. Shideh Fatemi has transformed women’s hair into “soft armour”, an explicit reference to the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, during which women appearing in public without the obligatory hijab became a powerful act of defiance, at the cost of hundreds of deaths.
Not everyone is persuaded that Tehran Art Month will have a meaningful impact. Several leading galleries, including Etemad and O, have declined to participate. Orkideh Daroodi, founder of O, questioned both the quality of the participating galleries and the speed with which the event was assembled at a difficult moment for artists.
“It would make more sense if galleries from other countries participated as well,” she says. “The art scene here is relatively small; we more or less all know and work within the same circles, so I don’t really see what such a fair would add.”
For galleries already under financial pressure, the war has compounded an existing fragility. Safaei says she had to leave her studio as spiralling inflation made the rent unaffordable, while attacks on steel and petrochemical plants had made sculpture increasingly unviable.
One gallerist, who asked not to be named, describes the commercial reality bluntly: “Some galleries have gone months without selling anything. We are selling top-level works bought by collectors, but not the second-tier pieces.” Yet after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 8, the gallery became something more than a marketplace. “When we reopened after the war, people stayed for hours, talking and socialising. It’s a way of life for us. Now we have to continue as a social responsibility. Art is saving us.”
That sense of art as a social space rather than simply a commodity returns at Artibition, where Anita Hashemi Moghaddam has turned her experience of last year’s war with Israel into a visual diary of photographs, notes and self-portraits.
In one note she writes: “I spend so much time in the room that it has increasingly become a cell for me.” Another reads: “They say we should leave the city, but I love this messy and crowded city.”
Then comes a line that perhaps best captures the emotional register of Tehran Art Month: “I am clinging, perhaps to the remnants of my hope for life and my hope for survival.”
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