Mapping Karimkhan
New Media Society
- Period
- 2017
- Location
- New Media Projects, Tehran
Project Overview
Mapping Karimkhan — Mapping the Cultural and Artistic Changes in the Heart of Tehran was a participatory mapping project carried out by New Media Society in the summer of 2017, focused on the cultural, social, and artistic transformations of the Karimkhan area of central Tehran in the past couple of years. The project asked how this transformation happened, who had been part of it, and where it might be heading.
Working from an expanded notion of mapping, the project read the map not as a neutral spatial representation but as a surface for recording narratives, lived experiences, and the forms of informal knowledge that official maps tend to leave out. Over three weeks, a large hand-drawn map on the black wall of New Media Projects became the centre of an evolving, in-progress archive that also included questionnaires, video interviews, a small library, informal meetings, and presentations.
Context & Site
The project was held at New Media Projects, an independent, artist-run, non-institutional space in Karimkhan, central Tehran. The choice of venue was tied to the project's logic. The questions it raised about cultural economy, urban change, and the role of artists within it needed a setting outside the formal cultural infrastructure: a semi-public, semi-private space where unhurried conversation, voluntary participation, and collective knowledge production could take shape.
The area being mapped, bounded roughly by Motahari and Larestan in the north, and by Mofateh, Hafez, and Taleghani in the south, was at once the project's subject and its surrounding environment. Since roughly the early 1990s, around the beginning of Rafsanjani's second presidential term, the Karimkhan area had been steadily becoming one of Tehran's main concentrations of cultural and artistic spaces, drawing artists, galleries, cafes, and audiences. The project asked how this had happened, who had been part of it, and where it might be heading. Over more than two decades this stretch of central Tehran had gone through gradual but significant change: shifts in land use, a concentration of cultural activity, rising property and rent prices, and what was beginning to be recognisable as gentrification. New Media Projects sat inside this transformation, which made the space both observer of, and participant in, what the project was trying to articulate.
Participation & Process
The first phase of the project ran for three weeks. At its centre was a large map of the Karimkhan area drawn on the black wall of New Media Projects, a wall the space often used as a blackboard and parallel archive surface. The map was set up from the start as an open, forming structure: not a finished representation to be presented to visitors, but something to be filled in, contested, and extended by the people who passed through.
Participants came from several overlapping groups: visual and new media artists, curators and cultural workers, researchers in art and urban studies (including architects and urban planners), residents of the Karimkhan area, people who passed through for work or leisure, and the regular audience of New Media Projects. They took part in different ways. Some marked active cultural and artistic locations directly on the map. Others identified spaces that no longer existed or had changed function. Some added temporary, independent, or less visible places that ordinarily have no entry in official maps or institutional archives. A parallel track was dedicated to storytelling: written and recorded recollections of living, working, exhibiting, or simply passing time in the area, often layered with nostalgia, criticism, or open questions about the changes underway.
Questionnaires invited visitors to record their views on the area's transformations, the reasons for the concentration of art there, and the consequences of that concentration. Some participants took part in longer video interviews. Informal meetings drew artists, researchers, and audiences into open conversations that often went beyond the map itself, touching on gentrification, cultural economy, the right to the city, the role of artists in urban change, and the relationship between art and everyday life. The space was deliberately set up to allow staying and pausing: tea, conversation, returns over multiple visits, so that participation could accumulate over time rather than register as a single transaction. By the end of the three weeks, the wall map held not only locations but also a network of relationships, disagreements, narratives, and lived experiences. The map itself remained on the wall until late autumn 2017.
Motivations & Questions
The project was motivated by the need to look closely at a transformation that had been unfolding for over two decades but had received little sustained attention from inside the art community itself. New Media Society wanted to bring artists, residents, cultural workers, and audiences into the same room around it, and to test whether art could play a role beyond observation — whether it could, at minimum, raise the question of its own complicity in urban change.
The project named three questions at the centre of its inquiry:
How have the cultural and artistic spaces in the area changed over the past twenty-four years, since the beginning of the second Reconstruction government? Do artists and art-lovers really have a particular interest in residing or working in this area, and if so, why? What is the current situation of the area, given the rise in cultural spaces, resident artists, and art-lovers, in relation to its surrounding environment? Looking at the present and at international experiences, can a reasonable picture be drawn of what is likely to emerge in the future?
Underneath these sat a broader political and methodological stance, which the project articulated directly:
One of the aims of the first phase of Mapping Karimkhan has been to reach a section of Tehran's art community and to familiarise them with gentrification and its consequences: the displacement and commercial takeover of residential areas; the temporariness of the current attractive conditions; the search for mid- and long-term approaches that might allow citizens to benefit from the potential created by this concentration in public space; a kind of temporary reclamation; and an effort to reduce the gap between long-standing residents and new arrivals.
The broader context the project worked inside was the question of the right to the city, and the recognition that artists, in concentrating in a residential area, were not standing outside its commercial transformation but were already part of it. Expanded mapping was chosen as the working method because it offered a way to bring informal narratives and first-hand experience into the kind of representation that ordinarily excludes them.
Conditions & Negotiations
The project ran without any financial sponsor or institutional support. It was carried out through the personal resources of those involved and through the infrastructure of New Media Projects — the condition that made independence from formal cultural authorities possible.
Resistance came from several directions and was not uniform. Some artists and cultural workers argued that gentrification in the Karimkhan area was not happening at a serious enough scale to warrant the attention the project was giving it; a position that the passage of time has since complicated. Cafe owners, cultural businesses, and real estate actors operating in the area saw the raising of these questions as working against their commercial interests, and made that known. At the same time, some long-term residents of the neighbourhood — including some who later faced sharp rent increases and were eventually forced to leave the area, in some cases the city, relocating to Rasht, Qeshm, and elsewhere — were also part of the conversations the project drew together.
The working approach inside these tensions was to step away from polarisation and hold the space open for dialogue and co-learning. Rather than offering conclusions, the project posed questions and made room for divergent and sometimes contradictory accounts. The use of multiple media — the wall map, video interviews, questionnaires, the library, informal meetings — was part of this approach: a way of letting different forms of knowledge sit alongside one another, and giving visitors reason to stay long enough for those forms to begin speaking to each other.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
Mapping Karimkhan was curated by New Media Society with contributions Amirali Ghasemi, Azadeh Behkish, Sona Bazazian, Aroosha Moshtagh, Shaghayegh Kamyar, Borna Ahmadi, Ali Ghoroghi, Pouria Jahanshad, Foozhan Khajeh, Eliza Barzin, Zeynab Feyz, and Ramona Rahimi. It was presented at New Media Projects with no financial sponsorship; all costs were covered through the personal resources of those involved, together with the infrastructure provided by New Media Projects.
Re-reading
Re-reading
Further Resources
Amirali Ghasemi & Arousha Moshtaghizadeh, “Mapping Karimkhan,” Tazro, no. 5, 2018 (in Persian).
Series of documentation posts, Modakheleh, Telegram (in Persian).
Yasaman Alipour, “New Media Society”, ArteEast Quarterly.
About the Artist
New Media Society is an independent, non-commercial, research-oriented collective in Tehran, active since June 2014 (Tir 1393). It has functioned as an archive, library, and project space, supporting media arts and emerging practices through lectures, workshops, publishing, and cultural residency programs. The collective has sought to fill a gap in academic infrastructure and to build connections between artists working in Iran and abroad, and New Media Projects, its physical space, hosted many other initiatives and partner collectives over the years. The Tehran space has been closed since January 2023, and the collective now continues as a nomadic and online entity. Mapping Karimkhan was one of its participatory urban projects.
Website: newmediasoc.com Instagram: @newmediasociety
This entry was prepared based on materials and texts shared by the collective, and edited in collaboration with the initiator.