To help raise public awareness about the worsening air pollution in Tehran, a group of artists have created artworks on the key health issue.
Tehran, home to 12 million people, has been struggling with toxic air for decades. As the situation goes from bad to worse no sustainable solution has been found by those in charge. Limited stopgap measures by urban planners and the municipality have failed to produce the desired results.
Silk Road Gallery, dedicated to the medium of photography, opened a group exhibition on April 13 reviewing the photos taken as a part of the ‘Tehran Monoxide Project’, a series of cultural activities conducted over six years (2011-2017) in collaboration with a large group of artists, designers, school students and people with backgrounds in the art, culture and research.
Negar Farajiani has curated the exhibit and her photos are also among the works. The photos will remain on show through May 7. The venue is located at No. 210 on Keshavarz Blvd., ISNA reported on its Persian website.
White Line Gallery, located at No. 22, Parvin Alley on Vali-e-Asr Street, also hosted a collection of combine paintings by artist Neda Rahi until Monday.
A combine painting is an artwork that incorporates various objects into a painted canvas surface, creating a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture.
Unlike her previous works that dealt with beauty of the world, the latest showed ‘ugliness’ of the city, Honaronline reported.
In her show ‘The Right to the City’, Rahi used wires, bolts and nuts to symbolize cars and the deteriorating conditions of modern cities, a mechanized city, while a black veil was used to show air pollution clouding over a city. Blackened exhaust pipes of vehicles and their toxic fumes were common in most of the collage paintings.
Explaining the name of the event, she said, “every human being has the right to clean air and to achieve that right we must take action. It is visible that talking does not suffice.”
Over the years and at short intervals air pollution has shut schools and offices in the sprawling capital and many other big cities, especially in the autumn and winter.
In December 2005, the odd-even traffic scheme was introduced to help curb the pollution in Tehran. The scheme, still in effect, allows entry of private cars in selected central parts of the city. This is in addition to the special traffic zone rules that ban the entry of cars from early morning to late evening save for those who have special permits.
