Hoardings in the Iranian capital are normally reserved for ads, religious quotes or anti-US slogans, but a new project has transformed the city into a giant gallery

Tehran’s billboards are usually a place for commercials about the latest gadgets, household items and cheese-flavoured crisps. They also display portraits of martyrs from the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, quotes from religious figures and the now less frequent “death to America” posters.



Tehran’s billboards replaced with artworks - in pictures Read more

But, overnight, the Iranian capital has had a facelift. In a project which the city’s mayor hopes will encourage people to visit museums, the billboard ads have been replaced with artworks by renowned local and foreign artists. For 10 days, images by the likes of Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Henri Matisse are turning the capital into a giant urban art gallery.

The long, tree-lined Modarres highway, named after a famous Islamic cleric, now displays Edvard Munch’s striking masterpiece, The Scream. Another street hosts The Son of Man by Magritte, the Belgian surrealist, next to a painting by the famous Iranian poet and artist Sohrab Sepehri. Not far from it is a large landscape by David Hockney – the original was shown at the Royal Academy three years ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billboards in Tehran’s streets are now showing artworks by renowned Iranian and foreign artists. Photograph: Farshad Abbasi/hamshahriphoto.ir

The pictures are among more than 1,500 billboards dotted across the capital’s streets, displaying a total of 700 works that also include reproductions of traditional Persian miniatures, carpets, calligraphy and various other art pieces.

The project, called A Gallery As Big As a Town, has been met with positive reactions online and by the Iranian press. Sadra Mohaqeq, an Iranian journalist with the reformist Shargh daily in Tehran, was delighted.

“It’s pretty exciting. It’s wonderful to see billboard ads of laundry machines or big corporate banks being replaced by a Rembrandt or a Cézanne or a Picasso, what better than that?” he told the Guardian. “For 10 days, people have time off from the usual billboard ads just promoting consumerism. It is going to affect people’s visual taste in a positive manner.”

Mohammad Babaee, another Tehrani citizen, said he was delighted to see works he had never seen before. “I had never heard of Barge Haulers on the Volga but now I get to see a big picture of it every day in Hemmat highway.”

Elaheh Khosravi said she had to rub her eyes twice in disbelief. “When I woke up this morning, something strange had happened,” she wrote on the Iranian news website Khabaronline. “I thought I was dreaming, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Tehran had turned into a museum.”



Shargh said the art had transformed Tehran into a giant canvas. “This is a very commendable move. It’s a festival of colour and movement,” it wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Officials hope the project will encourage more people to visit museums and galleries. Photograph: Farshad Abbasi/hamshahriphoto.ir

Mojtaba Mousavi, the project manager, said most of Tehran’s billboard spaces were run by private companies. “They weren’t initially comfortable with the idea of closing down their advertising business for 10 days but they finally approved to give us their spaces because it was a cultural activity,” he told Khabaronline.

“We were free in choosing the works but there was a general guideline. We wanted both Iranian and world art pieces and finally some 70% of the billboards are from Iran and the rest from the outside world,” he added. Among the artworks are images by Mahmoud Farshchian, a master of Persian paintings and miniatures.

Jamal Kamyab, a municipality official involved in the project, said it was done to encourage people to go to museums and art galleries more often. “Unfortunately people don’t visit museums or cultural institutions as often so we wanted to encourage them to go,” he said, according to Mehr News Agency. The project is curated by Iranian artist and sculptor Saeed Shahlapour.

Tehran also has a hidden treasure little known to the outside world. The city’s Museum of Contemporary Art holds the finest collection of modern art anywhere outside Europe and the US, boasting original works by Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Munch and Magritte.

But the pieces have been gathering dust in the basement of the museum for more than 30 years. Censors in Iran classed some as un-Islamic, pornographic or “too gay”, and they have never been shown in public. Others have been displayed only once or twice. In August 2012, a number of the collection’s paintings were put on show for the first time in Tehran as part of the museum’s Pop Art & Op Art exhibition, featuring works by Warhol, Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Victor Vasarely, Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns.

All billboards displayed in public have to be vetted by the authorities before they are put in place. In October 2013, a series of billboards questioning the US’s honesty in its dialogue with Iran made worldwide headlines. One showed an Iranian negotiator seated at a table talking face to face with his American counterpart. The US negotiator is half-civilian, half-military with a pump-action shotgun on his lap. “The US government styles honesty,” read the billboard.

Tehran’s mayor, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, has changed Tehran’s landscape significantly in recent years, building new bridges, tunnels and green spaces. The city’s budget has also increased under his watch.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Works by masters such as Picasso, Magritte and Matisse have turned the Iranian capital into a giant urban art gallery. Photograph: Hamed Khorshidi/hamshahriphoto.ir

Last year, Ghalibaf unveiled a spectacular high-tech bridge that was designed by a young female architect, Leila Araghian. She recently won an international award for the structure, designed when she was 26.

Art galleries in Tehran face huge difficulties in running exhibitions as all have to gain permission before they open doors to the public. In February, authorities shut down a gallery showcasing artist Nima Behnoud’s pop art exhibition of forms and calligraphic shapes at Shirin Art Gallery, although it had permission. The gallery owner was also briefly detained.



Widespread censorship has forced many prominent Iranian artists to leave home, including sculptor Parviz Tanavoli, one of Iran’s leading living artists.

A prominent Iranian art journal recently asked 100 art experts to name Iran’s top artists. Eight out of ten selected are exiled.