Tehran Monoxide

Negar Farajiani

Period: 2010-2020
Location: Tehran; Phase five in Bam and Darzikola
Thematic Tags: Public & Urban Space Self-Organised Space Institutional & Gallery Space Collective Making Workshop & Pedagogy Intervention Body, Gender & Care Environment & Ecology

Project Overview

Tehran Monoxide is a long-term participatory project initiated by Negar Farajiani in 2010 around the air pollution crisis in Tehran. Across five phases, the project moved through schools, pharmacies, urban and green spaces, galleries, and rural workshops, gathering artists, children, students, and citizens into a sustained inquiry about the relationship between people, the city, and the environment. Cultural, artistic, scientific, and educational tools were used to create sensitivity and awareness around the crisis, but the central concern was not the production of a finished work — it was the formation of dialogue, intergenerational learning, and shared care across the city's everyday spaces.

Context & Site

The project was executed across diverse contexts: schools, pharmacies, streets, gardens, galleries, educational platforms, and green spaces. The selection of these spaces instead of official galleries was deliberate — a way of creating a direct connection with the daily lives of citizens and enabling genuine dialogue and participation. Each stage of the project was defined by a specific social space and its rhythms. In the school, the project became educational and conversational. In the pharmacy, it became a meeting point for dialogue between people and artists around air pollution. In urban spaces, it expanded toward the care of plants and the daily interactions that grew around them. The space was not only the execution site but part of the process of creating meaning and communication.

Exhibition locations included Negarestan Garden, Silk Road Gallery, Manzoumeh Kherad Complex, Qasr Garden Museum, Enghelab Street, CCA Warsaw, Zohreh-No Pharmacy, ZK/U (Berlin), Depo (Istanbul), and a seminar at the Department of Environment. Workshops took place at Aaeen Mehr 2 School, Manzoumeh Kherad Complex, Biloba Greenhouse, Book Garden Children's Cafe, Darzikola village, the Bam Orphanage Center, and a caravanserai in Bam.

Participation & Process

Participation in Tehran Monoxide was designed as an open and multi-stage process, built on horizontal communication, intergenerational dialogue, and a focus on shared care and responsibility. Rather than emphasizing the result or product, the process of interaction and collective learning was central. The project worked as a form of "art as social action," continually redefining the relationship between education, environment, and the city.

Phase 1

The first phase began with the artist reaching out to friends: other artists, people with children, those for whom the concern around Tehran's air was already familiar. Roughly forty artists gradually gathered, and the dialogues that formed among them became the basis for an educational exhibition at the Manzoumeh Kherad Educational Complex in Tehran. The exhibition ran for two weeks and was visited by around 1,500 people, mostly students of Kherad and their families and teachers.

Phase 2

The reception in the first phase produced something Farajiani had not anticipated: the children genuinely engaged with the work. This encouraged a shift. Rather than continuing with artists showing work to children, she invited the children to photograph the city themselves, to see the air-pollution crisis through their own eyes. An open call was sent to a number of Tehran schools and remained open for two years. More than 450 photographs were collected, forming a two-year visual archive of an unfiltered child's view of the city. In collaboration with the Kherad Art House, an exhibition of the photos was held and prizes were awarded; a selection was later exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw in 2014.

Phase 3

After the second phase, Farajiani convened a number of the artists who had taken part to reflect on the path so far. Two threads kept returning: the involvement of children, and the relation of the project to urban space. Several artists began photographing children's presence in the city. Looking for an alternative space in which to exhibit those photos, Farajiani and a team of photographers came upon Zohreh-No Pharmacy by chance, a seventy-year-old pharmacy on Enghelab Street where the pharmacist, Dr. Torabi, welcomed the project. The photographs were placed among the shelves of medicines and hygiene products.

The works of eleven photographers, focused on the city and on children, were chosen for this phase. Two hundred and fifty copies of each photograph were printed as postcards, and customers of the pharmacy were free to take as many as they wished. One striking response came from an elementary-school teacher who carried a number of postcards back to her students; the students wrote texts and made collages in response, which were later returned to the artist. The phase ended with the production of a short documentary film, including an interview with Dr. Torabi inside the pharmacy. Torabi's small garden behind the pharmacy, together with her belief that lifestyle and education matter more to citizens' health than chemical medicines, informed the turn toward plants and care that defined the fourth and fifth phases.

Phase 4

The fourth phase marked a turn from documenting the crisis to a sustained interest in everyday care of the environment. Farajiani researched which plants actually filter the air and which can survive Tehran's climate. She selected eighteen kinds of houseplant and installed them at Negarestan Garden under the title Zoofa, the name of a medicinal plant. Beside each plant she placed a small brochure with its scientific name, an illustration, and care instructions. The installation remained in place for twenty days; people came, asked questions, and stayed to talk.

In the same garden, in collaboration with Homa Delvaray, they brought in car exhaust pipes blackened with soot and inscribed on them the names of trees native to Tehran, many of which have almost disappeared from the city. On Enghelab Street, she also performed as a street vendor, selling plants from a corner of the sidewalk; each pot carried a card explaining what the plant does and how to care for it. By the end of the day, all the plants had been sold. This phase convinced her that the project's deeper effect would come through education, leading to the shape that the fifth phase eventually took.

Phase 5: Green Corners

Green Corners began in 2017 and represents the culmination of the project's educational and care-based direction. Farajiani brought air-purifying plants into classrooms so that students would take direct responsibility for the care of a living thing. In collaboration with a botanist, a qualitative scoring system was designed: if the students could care well for an initial set of plants over the first month, the number of plants in the room would gradually grow, until a fully formed "green corner" came into being.

Over time, the project moved beyond the classroom into one-day workshops in different parts of Iran. At Tehran's Book Garden in early 2019, a workshop with ArchiKid introduced children to gardening tools and plant care. In Bam, in the spring of the same year, workshops were held in an old building called Hanasab and at a local orphanage; letters from Tehran students were carried to the children of Bam, and aloe was planted by participants as a sign of survival and resistance. In Darzikola village in the Hyrcanian forests of northern Iran, in autumn 2019, Tehran students wrote letters to the children of the village, sharing what they had been learning about the environment.

Motivations & Questions

The project originated from Farajiani's personal concern regarding Tehran's air pollution and its impact on her son's health. The question she has named as central to the project — and to her broader practice during these years — is:

From that starting point, the project sought to raise questions about the relationship between citizens, the city, and the environment, and through participation, dialogue, and collective care to rethink the connection between art, city, and daily life:

Across the project's phases, Farajiani has articulated a broader understanding of the artist's role that shaped how the work unfolded:

The project was also formed in response to official institutions' lack of attention to the environmental crisis and the absence of opportunity to discuss it. Farajiani consciously distanced herself from official spaces and galleries to create a context where dialogue with citizens and students, rather than exhibition for an elite audience, was at the center. The choice of everyday and non-political spaces was also a response to the state's severe suppression and control of social and environmental activism during that era, which made any gathering or collective action risky.

As an artist, mother, and citizen, how far can my agency go?
— Negar Farajiani

How far can the agency of an artist, mother, and citizen extend in the face of an environmental crisis? How might the relationship between citizens, the city, and the environment be rethought through participation? How might the connection between art, the city, and daily life be reimagined outside the gallery?

The role of artists in such projects is not merely to create artworks to decorate the city, but to create new contexts, possibilities, and situations for rethinking the issue itself, and to consider how projects can contribute to deeper dialogue between members of society from any age and any social background.
— Negar Farajiani

Conditions & Negotiations

The project encountered numerous obstacles: lack of institutional support, mandatory supervision from the Ministry of Education, political sensitivities toward environmental activities, and broader social pessimism regarding artistic work. Some parents criticized the artist's presence in the school — "we send our kids to learn math" — and some galleries considered the work "non-standard" because it was executed in schools and other non-gallery spaces.

To continue working within these conditions, the artist consciously avoided overt political action and articulated a method that she has described as "caution as a form of care." By choosing everyday and non-political spaces, focusing on dialogue and education, and protecting the trust of participants, especially of children and students, she was able to keep the project moving across more than a decade. Not relying on official institutions, and building instead on personal relationships and informal networks, was a further strategy for the project's continuation.

Documentation

Project timeline. Illustration from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Tehran Monoxide Exhibition poster. Designed by Homa Delvaray.

“Yasmin Sinai created a collaborative project with the students titled Bubbles of Hope. During the exhibition period, they created a mural along the lengthy stairwell wall, inspired by images of the city and their dreams. The students, led by Yasmin, painted a mural depicting gray and dense apartment blocks, a colorful sky, and installed bubbles containing plants hanging from the ceiling on the other side of the room.” Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“On their way to their classrooms, students often paused to view the interactive work by Shirin Hajikaramlou, and sometimes played with shadows they made while blocking the video projector.” Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“The first work viewable upon entering the school was Kianoush Tanha's interactive three-dimensional piece combining a car engine and its exhaust pipe. Once the viewer turned a manual switch on, the engine would start, and air would pump into the exhaust pipe so that the audience could use it to pump air into the balloons provided.” Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“Shirin Ghandchi and Ali Ghaemi had collaboratively created an animation using still images from their paintings. Ali's paintings themed around the city and its dense building blocks. Shirin had painted portraits of their son. The animation was presented on a TV screen in one of the classrooms.” Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“The wall opposite the Christophe Rezai installation was initially left blank to accommodate a growing work-in-progress, an interactive piece by Soroush Sehhat. He started the work by posting a piece of paper on the wall that included a description of the scene of a family stuck in a traffic jam. He then posted pieces of paper with written dialogue in response to the scene and asked students to contribute to this dialogic exchange based on their own imaginations and perspectives. By the end of the show, the wall was covered by many pieces of paper, each adding a unique voice to the larger conversation. Three years later, we exhibited the Soroush Sehhat work in the Negarestan Garden, in a new context.” Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“On the theater's walls, photographs by Jinoos Taghizadeh along with a number of writings were displayed. The writings were modified verses of Hafiz, changed in ways that would make air pollution and urban issues their theme. The artist had rewritten the verses and inserted them into sealed envelopes in the same style as the Hafiz divinations that are sold throughout Iran. The photographs depicted children wearing chemical safety masks and walking through the streets to sell the artist's envelopes to those stopped in traffic.” Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

Open call for participation in Tehran Monoxide phase 2. Designed by Homa Delvaray. Courtesy of the artist.

Photograph by thirteen-year-old Farnoush Gheibi. Photo courtesy of the artist.

A selection of photographs taken by schoolchildren in response to the open call. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Swapping Roles Exhibition. Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, Tehran, October 2014. Designed by Homa Delvaray.

“The drugstore's storefront and interior looked more interesting in the evenings, as the change in lighting would allow for better examination of details, like the colorful boxes of pharmaceutical and beauty products.” Photos by Kamyar Minoukadeh. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“Pictured is a schoolteacher whom I never met. She is selecting a number of photographs to take to her students, taking advice from Dr. Torabi. After a few days, she came back with the students' writings and their modified photographs.” Photos by Kamyar Minoukadeh. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

“Whenever I found vacant space in the shelves, I would ask Dr. Torabi's permission to place a few of the photos there. Pictured are photos by Sonita Alizadeh and Mohsen Yazdipour, placed near Vitamin C effervescent tablets.” Photo courtesy of the artist. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

Project poster, Negarestan Garden, 2015. Designed by Nazanin Shivaee. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Installation at Lalehzar Garden, 2015. Photo courtesy of the artist.

One-day performance, Plants for Better Air at Home — installation of plants on a busy corner in Enqelab Street, Tehran, 2015. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Installation view of Negar Farajiani's pieces in Flanerie, an exhibition curated by Alireza Labeshka. Kaaf Institute, Tehran, September 2016. Photo by Masih Mostajeran.

Introduction to Green Corners. Kaaf Institute, Tehran, 2017. Photo by Masih Mostajeran.

Green Corners workshop. Biloba Greenhouse, 2017. Photos by Samaneh Gholamnejad.

Students mounting a plant box in a classroom, Tehran, 2017. Photos by Samaneh Gholamnejad.

Green Corners workshop in association with ArchiKids, Tehran's Book Garden, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Green Corners workshop, Bam, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“In Darzikola, following an invitation from a local resident, we gathered in an alley that led to the forests to get to know each other. We learnt each other's names, sang songs and played games together, and talked about where we lived.” Green Corners workshop, Darzikola, 2019. Photo by Samaneh Gholamnejad. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

Green Corners workshop, Darzikola, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Tehran Monoxide Exhibition. Silk Road Gallery, Tehran, 2018. Photo by Masih Mostajeran.

While several critics reported to newspapers and magazines their distaste for the exhibition's unusual venue, the project generally received limited coverage as local media at the time were much less interested in the impact of art in social contexts as they are today. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

Artist's note. Extract from Tehran Monoxide book, 2021.

Collaborators & Support

The project was realized in collaboration with a wide network of institutions, spaces, and individuals, structured across its phases: Manzoumeh Kherad Complex, Kherad Art House, Doorbin Company, Derang Bahar Framing, Borna Nature Lovers Association, Children's Mehr House, Darvazeh Ghar Work, Parhoon Framing, Zohreh-No Pharmacy, Zibaloon Advertising Company, KAF Foundation, Book Garden Children's Cafe, Aaeen-e Mehr 2 School, Ra Studio, Mahforouz Ceramic Workshop, Biloba Greenhouse, Talaei Farm, Archikid Education Platform, Persbook, Yazd Visual Arts Association, Mersi-Si Eco-tourism, Inverse School (Phase 2: photo printing), Tat Bank / Mohsen Gallery (Phase 1: Booklet printing).

Phase 1 participants: Yasmin Sinai, Narges Haririan, Mandana Karimi, Farshid Shafiey, Atieh Bozorg-Sohrabi, Ali Samadpour, Shadi Ghadirian, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Rozita Sharafjahan, Neda Razavipour, Masoumeh Bakhtiari, Mohammad Mehdi Tabatabaei, Maryam Fereydouni, Behnam Kamrani, Ali Asghar Seyedabadi, Niloufar Rahnama, Mojtaba Tajik, Masoud Kalantari Khalilabad, Rana Shojaepour, Hootan Karoubeh, Shahriar Tavakoli, Christophe Rezai, Shirin Hajikarmlou, Soroush Sehat, Sara Salar, Mohammad Hassan Shahsavari, Mahnaz Pasikhani, Jamshid Haghighatshenas, Shadi Parand, Kiavash Saheb-Nasagh, Ali Ghaemi, Shirin Ghandchi, Vahid Nasiriyan, Simin Keramati, Kianoush Tanha, Abolfazl Shahi, and Marjan Kouchaki Shalmani.

Phase 2: Over 450 students from several Tehran schools, following an open call sent in collaboration with the Kherad Art House. A selection was made with Mersedeh Sadeghi, Shadi Ghadirian, and Mahboubeh Karamli. An exhibition was held at the Manzoumeh Kherad Institute with the support of Meysam Mahfouz (Parhoon) and the accompaniment of Mohammadreza Soltani, Nazanin Shivaei, and Azarakhsh Asgari. A selection of the photographs was later exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw in 2015.

Phase 3: Direct participation of Dr. Torabi, with an exhibition of photographs by Mahboubeh Karamli, Hoofer Haghighi, Abnous Alborzi, Afshin Chizari, Behshad Mohtashami, Mohsen Yazdipour, Farzaneh Ghadianpour, Ehsan Barati, Masih Mostajeran, Sonita Alizadeh, and Rojina Rezaei Rad.

Phase 4: In collaboration with Nazanin Shivaei.

Phase 5: With the participation of students from Aaeen-e Mehr 2 School, the Bam Orphanage Center, workshop participants at the Bam Caravanserai, and Darzikola village, in collaboration with the Biloba Greenhouse, Shahrouz Hakimi, Parnian Ferdows, and Nasrin Darzikola.

The project was self-funded by the artist, alongside in-kind support from the institutions and partners listed above. No central production budget was raised; each phase drew on the specific networks and resources of its collaborators.

Further Resources

Mehrdad Mirzaei's interview with Negar Farajiani (in Persian).

"Tehran Monoxide at Zohreh-Nou Pharmacy", Sarkhoshi (in Persian).

"Artist/Curators" public talks with Negar Farajiani, New Media Projects, YouTube (in Persian).

Artroz podcast, interview with Negar Farajiani (in Persian).

Roshd School Management magazine, no. 121 (in Persian).

Tehran Monoxide: A Project by Negar Farajiani (book).

Sara Mask, "Planted Responsibility," in Tehran Monoxide.

Hoofar Haghighi, "Tehran Monoxide," in Tehran Monoxide.

Behzad Khosravi Noori, "Tehran, a Phantasm of Modernity," in Tehran Monoxide.

Contemporary Iranian Photography: Five Perspectives, ed. Abbas Daneshvari.

Mohit.art, Notes #12 — Tehran Monoxide (2010–), Negar Farajiani, Ashkan Zahraie.

About the Artist

Negar Farajiani (born 1977, Yazd) is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator whose work focuses on the connection between humans and space, the body, memory, and the environment, as well as individuals and their society. Growing up in the desert city of Yazd shaped her sensitivity towards sustainability, interdependence, and the relationship between humans and place. Using textiles, video, sculpture, and participatory projects, she creates spaces where viewers transform into active participants within a living network of human relationships. She began her career with painting and graphic design, subsequently expanding into participatory and social practices that challenge dominant narratives and highlight often-overlooked communities. Through exhibitions, public artworks, workshops, and lectures both in Iran and abroad, Farajiani continues to build pathways for dialogue and collective presence, bridging local histories with global conversations.

Instagram: @negar.farajiani Website: www.negarfarajiani.com

This entry was prepared based on an interview with the artist, and materials shared by her.