Tehran

Karim Khan Zand

7 galleries · 1 museum · 0 places

About this district

Karim Khan Zand is the dense heart of Tehran's commercial gallery scene — a stretch of central avenue and the small streets running off it that together hold the highest concentration of contemporary galleries in the country. This is where the city's art world does its everyday work: openings on Friday afternoons, a gallery every few doors along the side alleys, decades-old spaces beside young ones. It is central, urban and walkable. The scene here is at full strength, and it shows.

Galleries

Museums

Places

No published places in this district yet.

A cross-section of a medieval bathhouse: bathers above, and below them two horned fire spirits tending the furnace that heats the water.
Editorial

The Real Jinn: How the Middle East Imagined Them Before Disney

Seven kings, one for each day of the week. A portrait of Fever. Two spirits keeping a bathhouse warm. What the manuscripts actually show — and what the lamp replaced.

Folio 35v of a manuscript in Oxford shows the public baths at Tiberias in cutaway. Upstairs, people washing. Downstairs, two jinn tending the furnace, mid-conversation. It is not what most of the world expects — and it is much closer to what the unseen was actually understood to be for. A long read across twelve centuries of manuscripts, fieldwork, survey data and horror cinema.