Artist Arash Nassiri makes work about Tehran, but not the city as it exists today. His films reconstruct the capital’s Western fantasies from the dreams and memories of the Iranian diaspora. In Tehran-Geles (2014) and City of Tales (2018), Nassiri interweaves the two urban fabrics — the Iranian capital and Los Angeles — projecting the past of one place onto the future of another. His latest work, which has been co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and Fondation Pernod Ricard for two solo exhibitions in 2026, focuses on “Persian palaces,” the ornate mansions built by Iranian families in Beverly Hills. Although their decorative style is often derided by neighbors, these grand homes are, for Nassiri, heritage sites that simultaneously represent émigrés’ cultural baggage and their pursuit of the American Dream. PIN–UP caught up with Nassiri while he was in L.A. for the prestigious Villa Albertine residency to discuss the complex meanings contained within these monumental homes.
Mimi Zeiger: Let’s start geographically. You’re originally from Tehran, but you now live in Berlin and are making a film in Los Angeles.
Arash Nassiri: I’m based in Berlin now, yes. I don’t know if “originally from Tehran” is correct, though. My passport says I was born there, but there are different ways of belonging to a place. I wouldn’t say I belong to Tehran in the way that a general citizen might. I left when I was a kid, and since then my relationship to Tehran has been intermittent — I go there for three months every year, and this back and forth feels like having double vision. My relationship to the country is through language and through my household. But my first memories are actually from Cité du Lignon in Switzerland, which is a Modernist social housing project near Geneva where I grew up. Lignon was a kind of utopia: there were over 100 nationalities and languages — and a lot of people were refugees from Eastern countries. We had this European life outside, but at home, it was a classic Tehrani life.
MZ: So, everyone in Lignon was from two places at once. In your case, it was Europe on the outside, Tehran at home. What does it mean to be Tehrani on the inside?
AN: More than being Tehrani on the inside, I would say what’s more defining to me is how two places can be embedded within each other. [Lignon] created a clear delimitation between the domestic space and the outside world.
MZ: You made the film Tehran-Geles (a commonly used portmanteau combining “Tehran” and “Los Angeles”) in 2014, and a decade later you’re here researching these so-called “Persian palaces” — architecture that is expressive inside and outside of its Persian heritage — for a new film. Tell me about how this concept of double vision found its way into your work?
AN: When I first started to engage with Tehran, I was not focused on Tehrangeles at all. I was interested in what Tehran didn’t become [because of the Islamic Revolution in 1979]. I had often heard the generation before me complain about what their life hadn’t been, what it hadn’t become, and how that was intertwined with Tehran. So, when I made Tehran-Geles, it was to show that Tehran didn’t become a Western, global city — even though there was a master plan for such a trajectory in the 1960s.
MZ: It could be said that The Tehran Comprehensive Plan was the peak of the relationship between L.A. and Tehran. Approved in 1966, the decentralized, de-densification scheme was developed by Iranian engineering firm Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian and Associates and L.A.’s own Victor Gruen, best known as the architect behind the modern shopping mall. So, the future of Tehran could have been something akin to Los Angeles.
AN: Yes. Both the terms “Persian palace” and “Tehrangeles” are misnomers that result from the act of translation.
MZ: So, the term “Persian palace” is derogatory?
AN: I think it’s a derogatory term because they don’t actually hold any Persian ornaments.
MZ: Would you say that this kind of architecture approaches what might be considered poor taste?
AN: Yes, I think it makes us question what is good or bad taste. What is valued and what is not valued? It’s revealing of the history — and amnesia — of architecture.
MZ: It acts as an expression of memory…
AN: …and imagination and interpretation.
MZ: There’s a tradition in L.A. of lifting styles from other places. The Swiss chalets and the Spanish Revival houses are as much a part of the vernacular as anything else in Los Angeles. Tell me a little bit about the specific aesthetics of the architecture you’re talking about.
AN: It’s a collage, incorporating nebulous references to the styles of Louis XV, the Roman Empire, and Greek antiquity, among others. And it’s very free — not a precise thing, nor an exact representation. It’s filtered through American culture. I met with Houman Sarshar, an Iranian scholar, who explained to me that this all began back in Tehran, when Western influence started filtering in during the mid-19th century. This happened alongside the founding of the polytechnic college, Dār ul-Funun, in 1851, which later became part of the University of Tehran. People were educated there, then traveled across Europe and brought back Western influences in art and design that became in vogue.
MZ: It was aspirational…
AN: But also auto-colonial. An intoxication with Western culture that is almost like the opposite side of the coin of Orientalism. A lot of reproductions of Western painting started to appear as well, layered over more traditional interiors.
MZ: The Iranian Revolution ended this trajectory in Tehran, of course, but many émigrés then repurposed and translated these Western influences when they built homes in Los Angeles in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. You’ve been speaking to Hamid Omrani, an architect in Beverly Hills, who built hundreds of these homes for the Persian-Jewish community, right?
AN: Yes. It’s worth noting that, while the Persian palace is certainly part of Hamid’s aesthetic, his practice is larger than that. He’s a very visionary architect. One thing I loved about spending time with Hamid, other than his generosity and openness, is what he shared with me about his process with his clients — they told him how they envisioned their home, and he imagined their vision, which itself was from memory of this Western vogue in Tehran. The houses he built represent his translation of what the clients wanted, which was a vision of Tehran filtered through this imaginary of Western culture.
PU: These residences, characterized by boxy volumes and decorated with Greek columns that frame oversized entrance ways, were the targets of anti-mansionization campaigns in the early 2000s. In 2004, the Beverly Hills Design Review Commission mandated that homes adhere to an “architecturally pure” Residential Style Design Catalogue, which constituted a kind of ban on ornamented construction.
AN: The guidelines basically made it impossible to build any more of these houses, which had long been disregarded or disliked by neighbors. These homes represent a culture clash — people coming to L.A. with their own taste and visions and building in their own style. These families wanted to live the American Dream, which they had made possible, and they also wanted to demonstrate their heritage and their culture in Beverly Hills. These homes express two things at once — the contradiction is the beauty of them. For me, they say, “I’m here, but I’m also not from here, right?” It’s a simultaneous thing.
MZ: This goes back to where we started, with the feeling of double vision, or a kind of flickering between places.
AN: Yes, flickering. That’s the beauty of it, especially now that they cannot be built anymore; the flickering is becoming more and more intermittent. Many of the existing houses are being modernized — remodeled, reconstructed — or simply destroyed. And in a way, this is a crime on top of many other crimes. I want these works to move the discussion around these homes from something with negative affect toward something celebratory and light. I feel strongly that just talking about taste or aesthetics misses the point here. What’s interesting is the people in these homes. The people I’ve been meeting over the course of this project are full of energy, and they look forward just as much as they look back. There’s a puppet cockroach in my film about these homes, which I consider a kind of tool. The cockroach speaks to everyone. It puts this almost sociological, historical discussion to the background because it’s a figure that’s simply trying to belong. Ultimately, the main thing for me is the mix of arrival and departure. You can belong to multiple things and multiple places at once.