Curated Capsules No.3 - Circulating Images: Print, Reproduction, and the Art of Garage Co.

Printmaking has long occupied an ambiguous position within the hierarchy of contemporary art. While historically central to the circulation of images, ideas, and political discourse, it has often been relegated to the margins of institutional attention, positioned somewhere between “fine art” and “applied” or “graphic” practice. In Iran, this marginalization has been particularly pronounced. Painting and sculpture continue to dominate the market and exhibition landscape, while print remains undervalued, under-theorized, and frequently misunderstood as secondary or derivative. Against this backdrop, GarageCo, a silkscreen studio based in Tehran, emerges not merely as a production space but as a conceptual intervention, one that reclaims print as a democratic, collaborative, and critically relevant medium. Founded by artist Sina Choopani, Garage Co began in 2016 as an experimental initiative rooted in material testing and collective exchange. By 2021, it evolved into a more structured collaborative platform, launching a long-term project dedicated to poster and paper-based print editions. Now in its third phase, Garage Co has worked with approximately twenty Iranian artists across different geographies, generations, and media. What unites these artists is not a shared aesthetic, but a willingness to translate their practices, which is often grounded in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, animation, or digital illustration, into the language of silkscreen. This act of translation is central to the project’s conceptual framework. It frames print not as a secondary mode of reproduction, but as a site where ideas are materially and politically rearticulated.
At the heart of Garage Co’s approach lies a sustained commitment to accessibility, one that is not merely economic, but conceptual. Silkscreen editions, by their very nature reproducible and comparatively affordable, unsettle the logic of scarcity that governs much of the contemporary art market, where value is often secured through uniqueness, limited circulation, and exclusivity. In privileging reproducibility over singularity, Garage Co positions printmaking as a medium capable of challenging the entrenched hierarchies of artistic value. This position closely echoes the theoretical foundations articulated by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a text that remains essential for understanding the cultural implications of media-based art  forms. Benjamin argues that technologies of reproduction fundamentally transform the status of the artwork by eroding its “aura”, a term he uses to describe the artwork’s unique presence in time and space, bound to ritual, tradition, and distance. The auratic artwork is encountered under controlled conditions, commonly within institutional or elite cultural environments. Reproducible media such as photography, film, and print, by contrast, detach the artwork from these conditions. They allow images to circulate independently of original context, making them accessible to broader audiences and embedding them within everyday life. While Benjamin’s analysis was formulated in response to early twentieth-century technologies, its implications for printmaking, particularly silkscreen, are profound. Print operates precisely through repetition, editioning, and circulation; it rejects the myth of the singular masterpiece in favor of multiplicity. Crucially, for Benjamin, the loss of aura does not signal a decline in artistic meaning or significance. Rather, it marks a shift in how art functions socially. As the artwork becomes reproducible, its value moves away from ritualistic uniqueness and toward exhibition, communication, and use. In this shift, art becomes increasingly politicized, not necessarily in terms of explicit content, but in its mode of address. Reproducible works invite engagement rather than reverence; they can be owned, shared, handled, and lived with. In the context of printmaking, this translates into a form of art that is inherently people-oriented, one that can circulate beyond gallery walls and reach audiences traditionally excluded from contemporary art markets.

Garage Co’s silkscreen editions activate this redistribution of cultural power in concrete ways. By working with artists to produce prints that are both conceptually rigorous and materially consistent, the studio undermines the assumption that artistic value must be anchored to scarcity. In this sense, Garage Co does not simply illustrate Benjamin’s theory; it operationalizes it. The studio demonstrates how printmaking can function as a contemporary infrastructure for access, circulation, and shared cultural participation, reaffirming that reproducibility, far from diminishing art, can expand its social and political reach. In a city like Tehran, where economic constraints, institutional limitations, and market pressures often restrict access to contemporary art, Garage Co offers a pragmatic and conceptual alternative. A silkscreen edition can circulate beyond galleries, be acquired by younger audiences, and exist in domestic or informal spaces without losing its artistic integrity. In this sense, Garage Co does not merely produce prints; it produces conditions for encounter. The studio becomes a mediator between artistic labor and public accessibility, challenging entrenched assumptions about value, originality, and ownership.
Yet the project is not nostalgic. Garage Co does not frame print as a return to older modes of production, nor does it romanticize manual labor in opposition to digital technologies. On the contrary, many of the works produced through the studio begin their form digitally. Artists such as Sepideh Zamani, Sadra Baniasadi, and Shahin Mansouri generate images through digital processes such as 3D modeling, illustration software, or screen-based composition, before translating them into silkscreen. This movement from digital file to physical print is crucial as it complicates the dialectic between the immaterial and the material, revealing how contemporary image-making is often hybrid by necessity. In Zamani’s practice, speed, repetition, and low-budget production are not constraints but conceptual drivers. Her background in graphic design and her involvement with the Tehran Carnival collective inform a visual language that embraces immediacy and adaptability. When her digitally generated images are transformed into silkscreen prints, they acquire a new rhythm. The hand-printing process introduces minor variations, subtle shifts in ink density, pressure, or alignment, that resist the seamless perfection of the screen. These variations reinsert the body into the image, reminding viewers that even reproducible works are shaped by labor. In her silkscreen edition, a montage of a sunset, an image that already carries connotations of repetition and cyclical return, becomes structurally aligned with the logic of reproducibility itself, reinforcing how the image’s repeated form mirrors the conceptual foundations of her practice. 
Similarly, Baniasadi’s engagement with satire, mythology, and popular imagery finds a natural extension in print. His practice, deeply informed by cartoons and comics, has always operated within a logic of circulation. Social media, zines, and illustrated publications are as much a part of his visual ecosystem as painting. Silkscreen allows his imagery to exist somewhere between these registers, more durable and intentional than a digital post, yet more accessible than a singular canvas. The print becomes a bridge between fine art and mass culture, echoing Benjamin’s assertion that reproducibility aligns art with politics rather than ritual.

Shahin Mansouri’s work, often rooted in installation and media critique, undergoes a similar transformation. His digitally constructed narratives, concerned with heroism, media spectacle, and identity, gain a different intensity when rendered as silkscreen posters. The poster format itself carries historical weight, associated with propaganda, advertising, and public messaging. In this context, Mansouri’s images operate as both artworks and cultural artifacts, engaging viewers in a dialogue about visibility, authority, and representation.
While digital-to-print translation plays a significant role at Garage Co, other artists approach silkscreen from materially distinct positions. Rana Dehghan, whose sculptural and painterly practice interrogates the afterlife of objects, uses print to extend her investigation into material transformation. Her work often involves altering everyday objects, removing them from their functional context and reintroducing them as expressive matter. In silkscreen, this logic persists. Objects are flattened, abstracted, and multiplied, yet traces of their origins remain. The print becomes a site where the object’s former utility and its new symbolic role coexist, resisting stable categorization. 
Nariman Farrokhi, a self-taught artist whose work centers on language, gesture, and mythological primitivism, finds in print a structure that mirrors his conceptual concerns. His evolving visual alphabet, resembling hieroglyphs, relies on repetition and rhythm. Silkscreen, with its emphasis on layering and recurrence, reinforces these qualities. Each edition becomes part of a broader system, where meaning emerges not from singularity but from accumulation.
In the case of Farbod Elkaei, whose paintings explore the intersection of geometry and landscape, silkscreen offers a means of distillation. His large-scale canvases, rich in color and spatial tension, are translated into more concentrated compositions. The reduction inherent in printmaking, limited color palettes, defined layers, sharpens the conceptual core of his work. Landscapes become signs; bodies fragment into abstract forms. The print does not replicate the painting; it reinterprets it.
Artists like Forouzan Safari and Milad Mousavi further expand the narrative scope of Garage Co’s editions. Safari, whose practice spans painting, digital illustration, and animation, approaches print as a storytelling device. Her commitment to amplifying marginalized voices aligns with the distributive potential of silkscreen. Prints can circulate in ways that animations or installations cannot, entering private collections, activist spaces, or informal networks. Mousavi, meanwhile, brings a deeply personal narrative approach to print. His self-referential imagery, influenced by cinema and animation, gains a new intimacy in paper form. The reproducible image becomes a repeated confession, a visual diary that resists closure.
Sina Ghadaksaz, whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, approaches print as a distinct site of visual and conceptual condensation. In his silkscreen edition, bright, saturated colors frame a central character whose body is inscribed with the phrase “super satisfied viewer,” set against the backdrop of a classical Romantic painting. The compositional layering of the contemporary figure, textual inscription, and historical image, creates a compressed visual field in which questions of spectatorship and pleasure converge. Within the reproducible format of the print, the auratic presence of the Romantic painting is simultaneously invoked and destabilized, its historical authority persists as an image, yet its uniqueness is dissolved through repetition.
Painters such as Soorena Petgar, whose work is marked by emotional intensity and painterly infatuation, encounter in silkscreen a productive tension. The medium’s inherent discipline contrasts with the expressive fluidity of watercolor and pencil. Yet this contrast does not diminish the work’s affective power. Instead, it reframes it. Petgar’s figures, landscapes, and symbolic scenes gain a new kind of stillness, one that invites prolonged looking rather than immediate immersion.

Golnaz Hosseini approaches silkscreen through a rigorously structured visual language rooted in geometry, symmetry, and reflection. Her print presents a large-scale, mirrored composition that evokes the form of a four-petaled flower, unfolding across the surface through precise repetition and balance. The geometric structure produces a sense of internal rhythm, where each segment reflects and reinforces the others, creating a unified yet dynamic whole. Within the logic of printmaking, this mirrored configuration gains particular resonance, reproducibility becomes an extension of the work’s formal logic rather than a technical condition imposed upon it. The repeated geometry aligns seamlessly with the edition format, allowing the image to circulate while preserving its spatial coherence and contemplative intensity.

Throughout these collaborations, Sina Choopani’s curatorial presence remains palpable. As an artist deeply invested in experimentation, material destruction, and the collision of high and low imagery, Choopani approaches silkscreen not as a neutral tool but as an active participant in meaning-making. His own practice, engaging themes of body, death, language, and pop culture, shapes Garage Co’s openness to hybridity. The studio is not prescriptive; artists are not asked to conform to a particular style or ideology. Instead, Choopani cultivates an environment where risk is encouraged and where the boundaries between media are deliberately blurred. This emphasis on collectivity is central to Garage Co’s identity. Unlike traditional print workshops that operate as service providers, Garage Co functions as a shared space of exchange. Artists work alongside one another, ideas circulate informally, and the process of printing becomes a site of dialogue. This collective model challenges the romantic notion of the solitary artist-genius, aligning instead with Benjamin’s vision of art as a social practice embedded in technological and material conditions. 
In the contemporary Iranian context, where artists navigate censorship, economic precarity, and limited institutional infrastructure, such collective spaces are not merely desirable, they are necessary. Garage Co offers a model of sustainability that does not rely solely on market success. By producing editions, artists can generate income without sacrificing conceptual rigor. By working collaboratively, they can share resources, knowledge, and visibility. Ultimately, Garage Co invites a reconsideration of what print can be today. It is neither a relic of past political movements nor a subordinate branch of fine art. It is a medium uniquely suited to our present moment, one defined by digital saturation and a renewed interest in material presence. Through silkscreen, Garage Co bridges the digital and the tactile, the individual and the collective, the experimental and the accessible. In doing so, it reactivates the democratic promise Benjamin articulated nearly a century ago. The dismantling of aura is not an end, but a beginning. A shift toward art that is people-oriented, process-driven, and open to multiplicity. Garage Co stands as a compelling example of how this promise can be realized, not abstractly, but through ink, paper, labor, and shared commitment.