Unfinished centers on Shahr-e No, Tehran’s former redlight district, which was set on fire and destroyed during the 1979 Revolution. The exhibition takes its conceptual point of departure from Kamran Shirdel’s film The Citadel, begun before the Revolution and completed afterward from interrupted footage and photographs by Kaveh Golestan—the only visual records to survive the site’s systematic erasure. The film ends with a single word: unfinished, naming not incompletion but a condition produced by political rupture, enforced interruption, and the conversion of violence into historical absence.

The participating artists worked directly with the site and its afterlives: the transformation of Shahr-e No into Razi Park, the disappearance of material traces, and the absorption of violence into urban space. Their works examine what remains when destruction leaves no ruins—when loss is managed as absence.

During the exhibition’s development, the recent national uprising intervened in this process. Blackouts, restricted movement, and disrupted communication transformed absence from a historical subject into a lived condition, reshaping the works themselves and making unfinishedness an operative reality.

Rather than reconstructing Shahr-e No or resolving its erasure through representation, Unfinished holds open the fractures left by disappearance. Here, unfinishedness functions as a mode of resistance, refusing closure and substitution, allowing images to remain provisional, accountable, and unresolved.

Participating Artists
Peggy Abbaspour
Soheila Bajelan
Marjan Ghorbani
Mahoor Mirshakak