When the call came early one morning, Tehran resident Elham Issari knew it must be urgent. The voice on the line was offering something precious. It’s overpriced and I know it’s overpriced but, if you want it, you have to buy it right now because there’s this other guy in this other city who wants it and you have to tell me within the next five minutes.” The tube of white paint would have cost Issari 5m tomans (about $36), she recalls.
Since the US and Israel launched joint airstrikes and combat operations on 28 February, and turned the screws on Iran’s economy, thousands of visual artists have been plunged into economic and professional limbo. The sudden onset of war shuttered commercial galleries in central Tehran, cancelled scheduled solo exhibitions, severed shipping channels and destroyed the fragile domestic market that allows creators to pay rent and sustain studio practices. But it was out of this systemic breakdown that Continuum: Artist Relief for Iran was born.
The initiative connects contemporary artists living and working inside Iran with international audiences, collectors and institutions through a dedicated platform at iranartistrelief.org. The project owes its existence to Dario Duran, a Canadian-Iranian curator and founder of Duran Art Projects. Born in Shiraz, but raised in Canada, Duran holds degrees in photography, art history and curatorial studies.
Six years ago, driven by nostalgia and a desire to connect with his heritage, he moved to Iran, where he fell in love with the dynamism of the domestic art scene. When war broke out, Duran found himself caught directly in its crosshairs. It was becoming unbearable.
We went by ground to the north of the country, where it was relatively quiet.” In the north, Duran encountered dozens of other displaced cultural workers who had fled bombed urban centers such as Tehran and Isfahan. He linked up there with Mariam Rasti, co-founder of Duran Art Projects, who had also fled the capital. Cancelled exhibitions, galleries closing, not being able to find materials, artists being displaced – every single person was going through the exact same uncertainty of what happens tomorrow.” Iran’s contemporary art world operates inside a structural bubble, isolated from international banking networks.
Typically, an artist works for one or two years to prepare a body of work, relying on a single gallery showcase to generate enough sales to survive for the next two years. When conflict brought that domestic cycle to a dead halt, creators faced immediate ruin. Duran says: “We realised that at this moment, exhibition making, curation, archiving – these things do not matter.
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