Iranian Graffiti

Browsing Flickr I came across several photostreams of graffiti art splashed onto the gray-brown canvases provided by the many modernist apartment blocks of Iranian cities. Many of these sly works of street art are stunningly beautiful, and purposefully mysterious. I can't read the Farsi script, but common motifs among the images are stencils of nature, children staring directly at the viewer, and military munitions like bombs and machine guns. Above: Work by the Tehran-based graffiti artist A1One.

The colors and styles are bright. Provocative. While adopting certain traits of revolutionary leftist propoganda imagery, these works aren't propaganda; they are whimsical, surreal, wry, absurd, as though intended to characterize the surrounding environment as bizzare and lacking humanity.
Top: Tags by Tehrani graffiti artists. (Photo by A1One.) Bottom: An article about graffiti artists in Hamshahri Javan magazine. (Photo by Tehran Post.)

Graffiti is becoming increasingly popular in Iran; the youth magazine Hamshahri Javan has a spread about the trend with the headline (translated by Persia at Tehran Post) "Graffiti [artists] are not dangerous."

The appearance of this article is interesting. Persia notes that the magazine is published by the Hamshahri Institute, a subsidiary of Tehran's conservative-dominated municipal government, and began publication during Ahmadinejad's term as Tehran's mayor. Does this indicate a degree of official tolerance for the street art trend? How aggressive are authorities in covering up new graffiti? It could well be the case that graffiti artists see their work more quickly erased by the anti-graf police squads in New York than in Tehran.