The Tehran Summit, co-founded by Erfan Ghiasi and Ghazel in 2022, was conceived as an independent, non-profit platform reimagining how art can exist and circulate within Iran’s complex political and cultural landscape. The Summit challenges the monopolization of art by both the market and state institutions, advocating for collaborative, socially engaged, and philosophically informed practices that foreground collective imagination over individual authorship.
Emerging from the same cultural soil that once nurtured the Shiraz Arts Festival (1967–1977)—a revolutionary meeting point for global avant-garde artists—The Tehran Summit continues that spirit of experimentation and exchange, yet transforms its framework to respond to contemporary realities. While the Shiraz Festival unfolded in the ancient ruins of Persepolis and Hafezieh, the Tehran Summit unfolds in the digital realm, using the internet as an emancipatory space. In a nation constrained by censorship, sanctions, and restricted mobility, this online format becomes an act of subversion—building a transnational bridge between Iran’s artistic community and global critical discourse. The Summit arises from an urgent need for independent, non-market initiatives and a renewed discourse on art as a social and philosophical practice. It serves as a forum for artists, theorists, and collectives to share ideas, research, and methods beyond institutional frameworks, creating new ecologies of exchange that resist both commodification and ideological control. Each May, during the absence of the sun in the Middle East, at 8:30 PM Tehran time, the Tehran Summit hosts a nightly gathering—shab neshini —a poetic format that turns nocturnal conversation into a site of resistance. By choosing to take place at night, the Summit symbolically rejects the “solar empire”—the Enlightenment-driven, monotheistic order that associates truth, visibility, and divinity with light. Instead, the Summit embraces the luminosity of darkness as a philosophical stance: a space for uncertainty, multiplicity, and collective thought. Through these nightly sessions, The Tehran Summit reconstructs what the Shiraz Arts Festival once embodied—an art of encounter and experimentation—while recontextualizing it for today’s fragmented, digital, and politically charged world. It is not simply an event but a living forum of heretical thinking, where art becomes an act of dialogue, speculation, and quiet resistance against the forces that seek to define, contain, or illuminate it.