When officials from Tehran municipality broke into the house of Iran’s most celebrated visual artist to remove works they claimed were city property, they carelessly put chains around the unwrapped bronze sculptures and lifted them with cranes. The raid on the home of Parviz Tanavoli – which damaged and broke artworks worth millions of pounds – was rooted in a decade-long dispute between the artist and the local government, but has now been dragged into a rivalry between the mayor of Tehran and the president, Hassan Rouhani.

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