A Photo Exhibit by Fotini Christia
Exhibition Design by Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh

This exhibit draws from a collection of over 130 images of the towering political murals that dominate Tehran's urban space. State-sponsored and hand-painted by artists close to the regime, they provide an insider's view of the Islamic Republic's psyche at a time when Iran makes daily headlines. Thematically, the murals feature images of the fathers of the Islamic Revolution and martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, as well as explicitly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel messages. The exhibit employs mixed visual media such as a fifty-foot-long cityscape design, depicting a number of murals in their urban context; installations simulating martyrs' shrines; and mega-banner replicas, as well as superimposed murals on a digital map of Tehran, giving a sense of their sheer number and geographic spread around the city. The primary objective is to document and present images that are part of Tehranians' daily visual experience and of which people in the U.S. are largely oblivious.