Keywords: Street art, Graffiti, Ecological activism, Iran, Contemporary art.
Street art from Iran has been barely reviewed in the global literature despite its richness, depth, and diversity. As a forbidden activity, these works are hard to follow and their brief lifespan makes it difficult to collect and classify information. Over more than three decades, graffiti art activity in Iran has evolved into a notable movement claiming an identity and independence based on the extent of its reach and its highly motivated practitioners who constantly interact with city walls despite severe restrictions.
Street art in Iran is diverse in stylistic and aesthetic features, many of which are of significant artistic quality. In this article, I am going to focus on the socially engaged aspects of Iranian street art which is committed to the fight against social amnesia and indifference.
Raising ecological awareness has been an emerging approach in Iranian street art. In recent years, artists including Black Hand, SERROR, Nafir, and Run, among many others have targeted ecological themes, trying to raise awareness and trigger changes in the attitudes and mentalities of society. Their works contribute to the debates on sustainability at various levels, bringing up issues including but not limited to air pollution, water and earth preservation, biodiversity, animal rights, privatizations, overconsumption, military spending, and the anthropogenic effects of climate change, in local and global levels.
It is important to note that Iran’s ecological situation is among the most critical in the world. The general public environmental awareness is not satisfactory, and the officials have little consideration to inform and enlighten the public, and the environmental activists are hugely suppressed. Against this background, the growing ecological movement is authentically compelling and motivated.
As global art historians increasingly postulate constructive discourse about the ecological crisis in parallel with the activist artists, Iranian art historians should also start conducting their course of study on a more responsible track, in accordance with the currents presently emerging within the Iranian artists, especially the most activist, underground, and mostly anonymous graffiti artists. In my research in Iranian graffiti art, I assumed a participant observation stance to be able to describe an elusive, underground world. I made friends with many of the Iranian street artists, maintained contact with them, made interviews, and asked for their views and improvements to imagine and finally draw the scheme of an art scene generally overlooked by contemporary art historians.
This presentation is excerpted from a pioneering research focused on ecologically conscious street art in Iran and will contain analysis of the currents and individual artworks, the context in which the ecological concerns of the work are set, quotes from the artists, and photos and documentations of the works.
PT
Helia Darabi (nascida em 1974 em Teerã) é uma historiadora independente da arte contemporânea iraniana baseada em Teerã. Ela escreveu extensivamente sobre as obras de artistas iranianos desde os anos 2000 e foi professora adjunta na Universidade de Arte de Teerã de 2006 a 2020. Seus campos de interesse na prática artística incluem arte ecológica e ecofeminista contemporânea, prática site-specific e arte de graffiti.
EN
Helia Darabi (born in 1974 in Tehran) is an independent historian of Iranian contemporary art based in Tehran. She has written extensively on the works of Iranian artists since the 2000s and has been an adjunct professor at the University of Art, Tehran from 2006 to 2020. Her fields of interest within art practice include ecological and contemporary eco-feminist art, site-specific practice, and graffiti art.