With Iran’s official cultural presence on the international stage increasingly uncertain, the 6th Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale in London, With My Roots, carries significance that extends well beyond the gallery walls.

Held at Mall Galleries from May 22–30, it brings together more than 100 Iranian artists from 17 countries, with over 180 works spanning painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. Despite its scale, the exhibition feels intimate: a space where Iranian culture emerges not as a single story, but as a field of tensions, inheritances and unresolved attachments.

Iran’s withdrawal from the Venice Biennale earlier this year exposed how fragile national representation has become, at a moment when art and geopolitics are increasingly difficult to separate.

Read more: What Iran’s absence from the Venice Biennale reveals about art and politics

Against that silence, this biennale tells a different – and in many ways more urgent – story. It shows how Iranian art continues to circulate when official platforms falter, and why independent cultural infrastructures matter in moments of political and material crisis.

Founded in 2016 by curator Marina Panahi through the gallery Capital Art London, the Iranian Contemporary Art Biennale has become a rare meeting point for artists inside Iran and across the diaspora. It brings together communities separated by migration, sanctions, censorship and political borders.

The biennale foregrounds tensions central to Iranian modern and contemporary experience: homeland and exile, tradition and modernity, visibility and erasure. These curatorial themes reflect the realities of artists working inside Iran. Censorship, economic........

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