Re-Creating the Citadel and the Photographs of Kaveh Golestan

Re-creating the Citadel and the Photographs of Kaveh Golestan is a political archaeology of a little-known crime committed in the early days of the nascent Islamic state in Iran in 1979. The starting point and artistic core of the book are sixty-one photographs taken between 1975 and 1977 by photographer Kaveh Golestan, who documented Tehran's red-light district a few years before it was violently set ablaze and wiped from the urban landscape and social memory. The book recovers the site and the social and spatial experiences associated with the area: its relationship to human life, the polis, social aesthetics, politics and dynamics, and the relationship between marginal and metropolitan citizenry. The project restores it to social memory and the public domain as a catalyzing moment in the establishment and preservation of a state-imposed project of violence against citizens and history itself.

KAVEH GOLESTAN (1950-2003) was an Iranian photojournalist and artist. The first exhibition of the recovered material curated by Vali Mahlouji was showcased at the Foam Museum of Photography, Amsterdam (2014), and then traveled to the Musée d'art Moderne, Paris and MAXXI Museum, Rome (2014 2015). Consequently, the materials toured Photo London Fair (2015), Tate Modern, London (2017-18), Rohtas Gallery2, Lahore (2020), De le Warr Pavilion (2019), and Arnolfini (2019-2020). Tate Modern acquired the project in 2016.