No, I Didn’t See Anything… :
New Perspectives on Tehran’s Former
Red-Light District
This project explores the erasure of Shahre-No, Tehran’s former red-light district, which was destroyed after the 1979 revolution and replaced with a park. Once a densely inhabited neighborhood, Shahre-No was systematically removed from the city’s physical and historical landscape. The project investigates this act of urban erasure and its implications on collective memory, gendered space, and visual representation.
The exhibition No, I Didn’t See Anything, held in Hamburg in 2024, brought together photographic works by myself and artists Nasrin Larijani and Parisa Davoudi, alongside Kamran Shirdel’s documentary Qaleh, one of the few existing visual records of the district. Together, these works formed a conversation around visibility, silence, and the aesthetics of absence.
Overlapping of old and new maps of the citadels of Shahre No. (Razi Park)
Lake Boundary Layer 1: Municipal Executive Operations, Archival Image, 1995. Layer 2: Bahman (February), Nasrin Larijani, 2023. Layer 3: Dredging, Hengame Hosseini, 2022. Layer 4: Fall, Parisa Davoudi, 2017
Exhibited at:
Künstlerhaus Soothbörn, Hamburg , Nov. 2024
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