Between flower stalls and concrete buildings, “Tehran: Testimonies 2016-2026” transports us into a city that still breathed. “In the early 2000s, I was studying photography at the University of Tehran,” writes Hannah Darabi, who has lived in France since 2007. Enghelab Avenue hummed with philosophical conversations, the Faranseh bakery offered French-style pastries, and student gatherings carried the weight of hope.
“This period also saw the emergence of a form of public life, for women as much as for men, through spaces and activities less strictly marked by gender segregation,” explains the artist, a graduate of the Tehran Fine Arts Faculty whose photographs are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Yet photographing this cultural effervescence seemed “inconceivable” to her. The Iranian regime’s prohibition has weighed on public space since 1979, varying in intensity with political upheavals, but ever-present as a muffled threat. Seven years of Parisian exile were necessary for this repressed impulse to resurface. “The need to attempt to give visual form to this once familiar, now distant space imposed itself,” she explains.
The artist has since built a body of work that “explores the relationships between image, history, and collective memory, particularly in the context of contemporary Iran and its diaspora.” Exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2023 and winner of the Prix Elysée 2025, she also presented at Le BAL in 2019 her project “Enghelab Street,” an exceptional collection of political books published during the Iranian Revolution.
This work of memory takes shape in her photographic series, produced during her stays in the country. Between 2013 and 2016, Hannah Darabi returned to Tehran with a discreet camera, to “produce images rooted in the lived experience of the ordinary city.” The photographs from “Moment” and “Perimeter,” part of her project “Haut Bas Fragile,” capture this precious banality: on the street, in front of a bed of geraniums, a man in a suit converses with another loading goods into the back of a pickup truck (Moment #68), yellow taxi drivers chat at a street corner (Moment #86), families lean over the waters of a basin in what appears to be a verdant park (Moment #92).
“These representations of an ordinary Tehran seek to visually translate this prohibition through a discreet gesture of disobedience,” emphasizes Hannah Darabi. The images dismantle the Orientalist stereotypes that saturate the Western imagination. No crowds at prayer, no propaganda murals, no veiled women brandishing placards. Just a city that lives, breathes, blooms despite everything.
A bed of yellow daisies and pink petunias colonizes a median strip in front of shops with Persian signs (Moment #91), an unfinished construction site raises its concrete framework above a busy street (Perimeter #1). “I questioned the images commonly associated with the Iranian capital, often reduced to media representations of conflict, repression, or political crisis,” the artist continues.
Yet this Tehran exists, fragile and obstinate, woven from small daily events that photography preserves from oblivion. The exhibition at the Ithaque gallery does not merely show it. It confronts these memories with the present. “Today, under the shadow of an unprecedented offensive by the Iranian government against unarmed protesters, the streets of Tehran have become the theater of a crime without equivalent,” observes Hannah Darabi.
Between each photograph, testimonies collected during the internet blackout of January 2026 are interspersed, when the regime sought to stifle any visual narrative of the protests. “Hoping for the day we fly with our skateboards,” Mohammadreza Entezami had written on Instagram before being shot dead on January 8 in the Narmak district.
In Tehranpars, 262 gunshots ring out in six minutes on a video where cries of terror and slogans of resistance intertwine. In Ponak Square, the Kurds who had been dancing were shot shortly after; many died. “I connected for a moment, and just wanted to write Woman, Life, Freedom, forever,” tweeted Raha Beloulipour, a twenty-three-year-old student, before she too was killed.
This dialogue reveals the sinister mutation of urban space. “If Walter Benjamin described the empty streets and silent scenes of Paris photographed by Atget as crime scenes, in the narrative-less Tehran of ‘Haut Bas Fragile’, the crime now unfolds before our eyes,” notes Hannah Darabi.
Yet the exhibition’s design refuses despair. “Despite the bloody repression, the total internet blackout and the lack of information, the few videos coming out of Tehran show that, once again tonight, people are in the streets: resistance and protests continue,” recalls a testimony dated January 10. At the University of Tehran, on January 26, students gathered to mourn their comrades killed during the blackout. “Despite the literal bloodbath orchestrated by the regime, the people continue to resist,” affirms another witness.
If Hannah Darabi offers no easy consolation, she keeps alive the memory of what was and bears witness to what is unfolding. To show and tell this is to resist.
The exhibition “Tehran: Testimonies 2016-2026” by Hannah Darabi is on view from Thursday, February 5 to Saturday, March 21, 2026 at the Ithaque gallery.
An opening reception in the presence of the artist will be held on Thursday, February 5 at 6 p.m.
