Statement:

The aim of the exhibition is to provide a new documentation of the citadel of Shahr-e No, the former red-light district of Tehran. The citadel was set on fire on January 29, 1979, at the time of the Islamic Revolution. In the following years, it was turned into a park as part of an authoritarian cultural cleansing project, only to be forgotten forever in the collective memory.///

Initiated by Hengame Hosseini and with the participation of Parisa Davoudi and Nasrin Larijani, the exhibition presents works that offer a new perspective on the history of this place. Using photography, the artists explore the traces of the past in this space to remember and resist the violence of authoritarian erasures.

The exhibition proposal, aptly titled “No, I didn’t see anything…”, takes its title from a poignant video in which a frightened resident of the neighborhood is asked if she saw the perpetrators of the fire, to which she replies: “Don’t kill me, I didn’t see anything.”

As female artists born after the revolution, they explore the theme of observation in this place that they have never personally experienced. They believe that the parallelism of their artistic representations can serve as a guide to revive the memory of a place that has been systematically erased from the collective consciousness.