“We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants.”

Kevin Lynch

O Gallery presents “T-E-H-R-A-N”, a collection of works by Fatemeh Khajehnoori (b. 1985 Tehran) curated by Aidin Bagheri. T-e-h-r-a-n collection is a dual and site-specific narrative of the city of Tehran, hit by the shock of the Corona pandemic and its resistance, underlining the daily life of the people in the last two years. In early March 2019, when the Iranian government officially announced the outbreak of Covid-19, perhaps few people thought that when the country was preparing for the Nowruz holidays in the late March, markets, recreations, commercial centers and holy places in different cities of Iran would be forced to stay closed.

The often-fervent Tehran suddenly got leashed; creating an opportunity to see the city as if abandoned was a dream come true, far from anyone’s expectation. Knowing that the situation was by no means temporary, I re-captured the selected scenes a year later. This time, Tehran, endured by this chronic panic, had resisted, not by the abolition of the horrifying shadows of disease, but rather surrendered to the life in fear of a lucid nightmare; a dual image that neither means the end nor the continuation: it mutates, dissolves, suspends, gets suspended, upturns and gets misread.

Fatemeh Khajehnoori