I kept hearing about a gallery in a cellar. I went down the stairs and found the engine room of Tehran's art.
Everyone kept telling me to go down to the basement. Not a metaphor — an actual cellar, down a flight of stairs off a north-Tehran street, where one of the most important things in the city's art world has been happening quietly since 2012.
It is called Dastan's Basement, and its founder, Hormoz Hematian, did not set out to run a gallery at all. He trained as a civil engineer, decided he hated it, and made a hard turn toward art. What he built is less a white cube than an engine room — a place where young, unknown artists get their first wall.
“Downstairs is the audition; upstairs is the encore. Either way, you go because the work is alive.”
He describes it, half-joking, as an audition room: dozens of shows a year, the work uneven, some of it thrilling, all of it priced to move. If a handful of those artists get picked up, the year was a success. When they are ready, he moves them 'upstairs' to a second space — a minor league with a real path to the majors.
There is a reason so much of this happens below ground. The basements are cool in a brutal summer, and in a country that draws such a sharp line between public and private, a room at the bottom of a staircase simply feels safer, freer, more yours. The art made for those rooms is braver for it.
I went on a Friday, of course, because that is when the city opens its shows and the crowd spills onto the pavement with little glasses of tea. I stood in a packed cellar in front of a painting by someone no one had heard of a year ago, and felt the thing I am always looking for — work that is completely alive, and completely now.
That is where a good part of our contemporary art comes from. Not the safe names, not the museum walls, but the staircase, the cellar, the artist on their first or second show. We like to catch them on the way up.
