As the regional crisis deepens, Iranian artists are grappling with geopolitical shock waves and decades of personal history.
For creatives inside Iran and across the diaspora, the escalation has triggered a mix of relief, fear, guilt and fragile hope.
Ashkan Zahraei, a writer and curator of Tehran’s Dastan Gallery, says the military action runs counter to years of effort by Iranian artists to sustain cultural dialogue beyond politics.
“It’s so sad to see politicians trying to break down the bridges we have been working to maintain across cultural landscapes,” he tells The National from Tehran. “But we keep having faith in the timeless message of art, its resilience and its power to establish mutual friendships and understanding.”
Zahraei, who has worked to place Iranian contemporary art within international conversations despite domestic constraints, including participating in Art Dubai, describes the moment as a rupture. While artists at home have long navigated censorship, they have also sought to maintain cross-border relationships – efforts now overshadowed by military escalation.
In Dubai, where a large Iranian community has built businesses, galleries and studios over decades, the emotional landscape is somewhat different.
Sahar Ghavami, an Iranian artist exhibiting a solo show at FN Designs in Alserkal Avenue, describes the past few days as a collision of long-held trauma and unexpected possibility.
“At first it felt liberating,” she says. “All my friends and I had to leave the country for freedom of expression and safety for our families. The trauma I have from the regime goes back as early as I can remember. We thought we would never see the day that the suffocation ends.”
For many in exile, returning home – even to attend funerals or visit the graves of loved ones, some of whom they say died at the hands of the regime – has felt impossible, Ghavami explains. But that initial sense of release has quickly become complicated.
“Seeing how it is retaliating and trying to bring other countries down with it is very upsetting and makes me anxious,” she says. “The UAE is where people have moved to have a safe home. To attack it like this makes me feel guilty. It’s not me doing it, but I feel guilty that the demon is unleashed outside its borders and is attacking our second home too.”
Communication with family members inside Iran has been sporadic, she adds, intensifying the emotional strain.
The crisis has also reshaped her artistic process. Ghavami had been working on a new body of work, processing what she describes as “the pain the regime inflicted” and her anger at recent events. Now, she says, that direction no longer feels sufficient.
“The previous art I was working on was coming from a place of helplessness,” she says. “Now I have some hope that this would end. I want to honour the hope. My feelings are mixed, and I’m trying out new ideas to process the situation – that maybe this was all not for nothing.”
If there is one message she hopes audiences take away, it is a separation between people and state.
“My whole life I had to feel shame when telling people I’m Iranian,” she says. “They would first relate me to the regime and be scared. I want people to understand that Iranians are brave, fighters, and have been living under this for almost 50 years. We are not the regime.”
For Iranian creatives, whether working under constraint in Tehran or in relative freedom abroad, the crisis has once again blurred the boundary between art and politics.
Yet, as Zahraei suggests from Tehran, the belief in art as a connective force persists – even as the region around it destabilises.
