Featuring the work of eight artists living in Tehran, Iran – Nima Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh, Mohammad Ghazali, Ghazaleh Hedayat, Abbas Kowsari, Mehran Mohajer, Neda Razavipour, and Homayoun Sirizi – alongside new work by San Francisco- based artist Taraneh Hemami, this exhibition compiles a collective narrative of everyday Tehran, the largest city in the Middle East and the 16th most populated city in the world with close to 8 million residents. Representing the current unpredictability of each day in Tehran and also the hope that comes from imagining a better future, the artists chronicle narratives of place and time, demystifying life in a country that has been misunderstood and maligned for decades.

In 2007, Taraneh Hemami began working on One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran with participating artist Ghazaleh Hedayat, who graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and whom Hemami collaborated with in the past, to identify a group of artists in Tehran to engage with their immediate environment by responding to the mundane and the ordinary through observations of people, objects, and rituals.  One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran is a natural progression for Hemami, who for years has organized and directed a number of collective, collaborative projects with the Bay Area Iranian American community (CrossConnections, Theory of Survival) in addition to her own studio practice. Chronicling narratives of place and time, the collective of artists in Tehran began to examine the relationship between the patterns, rhythms, and systems that emerged from their everyday experiences in Tehran within the larger social and cultural context of the city.  For over a year, Hemami and Hedayat maintained regular communications and held meetings with the collective of artists in Tehran to both form and inform the work for the One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran project. 

However, no one could have predicted the recent turn of events in Iran preceding and following the Presidential elections this summer.  The title One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran represents the current unpredictability of each day in Tehran and also the hope that comes from imagining a better future.  Although the context for this exhibition has shifted dramatically since the elections in Iran (including issues of freedom of expression, technology's influence on communication and mobilization, citizen disappearances), the artists in the exhibition have embraced the unexpected change and present recent and new work exploring the many layers of contemporary life in Tehran through photography, video, drawings, and sound.