Bahar Behbahani on Persian Gardens as Living Knowledge Systems

Bahar Behbahani, an Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, discusses her ongoing engagement with the Persian garden as a framework for exploring political power, ecology, and cultural memory. In an interview by Noushin Afzali on Berlin Art Link, Behbahani describes the garden not as a fixed image of paradise but as a spatial intelligence shaped by scarcity, care, and adaptation. Central to her practice is the Qanat, a 2,500-year-old underground water system that embodies ancestral knowledge. Her projects like 'Garden Coup' (2015-16) and 'Garden of Desire' (2023) examine how gardens hold beauty alongside political history, including the 1953 coup in Iran and declassified CIA documents. She references Fin Garden in Kashan, a UNESCO site where Amir Kabir was assassinated, and Mosaddegh's confinement to his garden after the coup. Behbahani's work incorporates cartography, waterways, and botanical forms, as seen in 'Aerial Roots' (2023) and 'Biography of Garden City,' which translate climate data into visual form. Her recent piece 'Damask Rose: A Gathering' (2026), a crocheted environment made in Tehran by her mother and friends during national unrest, was carried across borders and activated in New York as a gathering space for diasporic communities. Behbahani emphasizes that Persian gardens are ecological infrastructures, not just heritage sites, and asks what is carried and planted in displacement.