Kian Ansari

Kian Ansari draws city plans for a Tehran that was proposed on paper but never built, working in the visual language of old municipal survey maps — hand-ruled grids, numbered lots, a legend that names streets which never received a curb or a streetlamp. He layers several competing proposals on top of one another, so grids from different decades overlap and streets from one plan dead-end into a block from another. Each drawing is screenprinted in a limited run, run through the press by hand rather than a mechanized rig, which leaves small registration shifts between layers that he doesn't correct. He works from a studio in Iran and ships through a screened export partner who has represented printmakers in his circle for several years.

Kian Ansari screenprints imagined city plans for a Tehran that never got built the way old maps once proposed — grids over grids, streets that never met.

Tehran, Iran

He's drawn to the version of the city that stayed a proposal — the streets that only ever existed as a plan.