by Noushin Afzali // July 3, 2026
Bahar Behbahani is an Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, installation and placemaking. Her research-driven practice draws on landscape, ecology and cultural memory to explore themes of political power.
In our conversation, we discuss Behbahani’s ongoing engagement with the Persian garden as a central framework in her practice. Moving beyond the idea of the garden as an image of paradise, she examines it as a complex system of knowledge shaped by care and adaptation. Thinking through imperial and colonial systems of naming and categorization as forms of control, Behbahani reflects on how these garden landscapes carry histories of belonging and displacement, and why their preservation also ensures the preservation of important living knowledge and modes of relation.
Bahar Behbahani, portrait // Photo by Tommy Armstrong
Noushin Afzali: The Persian garden appears throughout your work not simply as a cultural or architectural form, but as a lens through which histories of empire, displacement, ecology and memory can be explored. What continues to draw you to this motif?
Bahar Behbahani: The Persian garden appears in my work less as a fixed subject and more as a way of thinking. It is not only a cultural or architectural reference, but a spatial intelligence shaped through ecology, imagination and care, especially in relation to scarcity.
It emerges from arid landscapes where water, shade, soil and planting had to be carefully negotiated. At its core is the Qanat, an underground water system over 2,500 years old that carries groundwater across long distances without pumps or evaporation loss. It requires an intimate knowledge of geology, sediment, plant roots and soil behavior. For me, it holds ancestral intelligence: collective labor, patience and long-term care embedded into the land. Many of these systems are still functioning today, while others have been damaged through war, sanctions and mismanagement. It is also a fragile living knowledge.
In projects like ‘Garden Coup,’ I became interested in how a garden holds both beauty and political history, how a landscape can carry personal memory while revealing larger histories of intervention, erasure and power.
Today, I see the Persian garden through questions of migration, displacement, climate adaptation and empire. Rather than an idealized image of paradise, I am drawn to its layered histories, where beauty is entangled with systems of control, surveillance and environmental change.
In my work, the garden becomes a way of holding these layers together, moving between the intimate and the geopolitical, between memory and collective history. More recently, I have been thinking about the garden as something that can be carried: what travels with people when they are displaced, and how ecological knowledge, hospitality and care continue across borders. That is what keeps me returning to it. Not as a fixed memory of paradise, but as something still unfolding, a practice we can learn from and continue today. A garden of the future.
Bahar Behbahani: ‘Consolidating the Plan,’ 2015-16, mixed media on canvas // Courtesy of the artist
NA: Your practice often moves between personal memory and collective history, transforming landscapes into sites of political and emotional significance. How do you navigate the relationship between the autobiographical and the geopolitical?
BB: For me, the autobiographical and geopolitical are never entirely separate; they continuously shape one another. Much like the Qanat, memories, forms of resistance and ways of knowing continue beneath the surface. I think of my work as tracing those underground connections: how historical forces become intimate, and how intimate experiences reveal larger structures of power, survival and collective imagination.
In ‘Garden of Desire,’ personal memories of landscape existed alongside archival materials related to the 1953 coup in Iran, including declassified CIA planning documents that revealed how Persian garden scholarship itself became entangled with the machinery of regime change. It is a history I have returned to in different ways throughout my practice for many years. I wasn’t interested in illustrating history, but in understanding how it remains present—how certain events continue to reverberate across generations, places and bodies.
The work included a braided self-watering system, and looking back, I realize how many strands of the project converged there. The structure carried water through circulation and interdependence rather than through a single point of control. At the same time, the braided form inevitably echoed other histories unfolding around it, including the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. The work became a place where different temporalities could coexist: ancestral knowledge, political rupture, ecological systems, personal memory and our contemporary flux.
Bahar Behbahani: ‘Garden of Desire,’ 2023 // Courtesy of the artist
NA: Gardens have long functioned as spaces of refuge, but also of control and power. How does this tension shape your engagement with the Persian garden, particularly in relation to questions of belonging and identity?
BB: What interests me most is that the Persian garden resists a single meaning. It is often imagined as a place of refuge, beauty and belonging, but historically it has also been a site of diplomacy, knowledge production, exile and political violence.
Fin Garden, the centuries-old UNESCO World Heritage Persian garden in Kashan, is remembered not only for its beauty but also as the site where Amir Kabir, one of Iran’s most celebrated reformers, was assassinated. After the 1953 coup, Mosaddegh—the democratically elected prime minister—spent years confined to his own garden in Ahmadabad. Arthur Upham Pope’s founding of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, later re-established as the Asia Institute in Shiraz at Narenjestan-e Qavam, points to another dimension of the garden as a political and cultural space, one through which knowledge about Iran was gathered, institutionalized and mediated through Western scholarly frameworks. These examples reveal how gardens can function not only as places of sanctuary, but also as stages where power becomes visible in different ways.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to it. Having lived between cultures and geographies, I think of belonging less as a fixed identity than as an ongoing negotiation. The garden becomes a space where multiple histories and political realities meet. For me, it is not a symbol of paradise, but a place where refuge and displacement, belonging and exclusion, remain in constant dialogue.
Bahar Behbahani: ‘Aerial Roots,’ 2023, acrylic, ink, pencil on canvas, 254 x 178 cm // Courtesy of the artist
NA: You frequently draw on cartography, waterways and botanical forms in your practice. What role do these recurring motifs play in your exploration of geography and movement?
BB: When I first encountered ‘Paradise Lost: Persia from Above’ by Georg Gerster, published in 1976, what stayed with me was the title itself: “paradise” already framed as something lost, then reassembled through the authority of the aerial view. It made me think about how naming is never neutral, but a way of organizing visibility: what is elevated, what is aestheticized and what disappears beneath that framing.
That question of nomenclature runs through my practice more broadly. Systems of naming, whether in mapping, botany or climate discourse, are deeply political. They do not simply describe the world; they structure how it is seen and governed.
In ‘Biography of Garden City’ and works like ‘Aerial Roots,’ I move through cartography, surveillance imagery and subterranean water systems as ways of reading a city as unstable and alive. The work grows out of climate data such as heat waves, flood records and environmental thresholds, translating abstract systems into visual form.
The mark-making also draws on textile traditions from Central and West Asia, where pattern and repetition carried knowledge systems embedded in material culture. I think of painting as both topography and testimony, tracing what lies beneath the surface and what remains unseen. Rather than a fixed map, I think of my work as a shifting cartography: stitched, relational and unsettled. A way of keeping geography open; closer to lived climate than to the authority of the overview.
Bahar Behbahani: ‘Damask Rose: A Gathering,’ 2026 // Courtesy of the artist
NA: At a time marked by environmental crisis, migration and contested histories, your work invites a reconsideration of landscape as a living archive. What do you hope audiences understand about the Persian garden’s relevance to the present moment?
BB: Persian gardens are not only aesthetic forms or layouts, but carefully constructed environmental systems that regulate water, temperature and wind. They embody an ecological intelligence that shaped how people lived.
That is why they matter beyond representation: they are infrastructures of life, and when they are damaged, erased or bombed, what is lost is not only a garden but a deeper system of knowledge, relation and survival, often reduced today to “historical gardens” or heritage sites rather than recognized as living ecological and cultural systems.
I return to the Persian garden because of this depth. It is a living structure shaped by scarcity, care and adaptation.
In ‘Damask Rose: A Gathering,’ this thinking became embodied in a crocheted environment made in Tehran by my mother and her circle of friends amid months of national unrest, state repression and the recent U.S.–Israel bombardment of Iran. She carried it across borders through Turkey, where it became a body archive of care and was later activated in New York as a shade-giving gathering space for diasporic communities from the Global South, offering rest, conversation and shared memory at a just temperature.
What feels urgent is how these systems persist or disappear under violence, climate instability and displacement. The question is not how to preserve the garden as an object, but how to understand its intelligence when it is interrupted or carried elsewhere.
What is the architecture of gathering in a precarious time? Can hospitality become political? In displacement, what do we carry, what do we plant? Perhaps each of us is a rose garden.
