Over the past few months, sculptor Parviz Tanavoli has been described to me as a visionary who is “a giant among his generation;” a master of modern art who “almost single-handedly resurrected sculpture as an art form in Iran”; and “quite simply the most famous and influential living artist from the Islamic world.” Tanavoli, who was born in Iran, divides his time between Tehran and Horseshoe Bay, north of Vancouver, where he has lived since 1989. But while 2015 is shaping up to be perhaps the biggest of his career, with a major retrospective that has just opened outside Boston and more to come, recognition has largely eluded him at home in Canada.

Read More: Master of Bronze Parviz Tanavoli Strives for Recognition on Home Soil

See also: Parviz Tanavoli: A Pawn in Iran’s Culture Wars

On 16 March 2014 renowned Iranian sculptor Parviz Tanavoli awoke in his Tehran home to the sound of his daughter screaming. Twenty men had broken the locks on the door and entered his home. They refused to show identification, and proceeded to seize all the artwork they could find. Tanavoli’s daughter filmed the men as they bound the massive sculptures with metal chains and lifted them with small cranes onto pickup trucks waiting on the street outside. One rectangular bronze piece was not harnessed securely, and fell off its wooden pallet onto the street.

Read More: Parviz Tanavoli: A Pawn in Iran’s Culture Wars

See also: Parviz Tanavoli: Plenty of ‘Nothing’

As a young boy Parviv Tanavoli’s favourite toy was the simple lock. As there were no ready-made toys like those of today he would take them apart, fix them and make keys for the ones that didn’t work. “I was the locksmith of the neighbourhood because all the locks in those days had one key and they were handmade. There weren’t that many machine-made locks. If there were they were very expensive,” he tells me. Later Tanavoli went to Italy to study. It was on his return, he recalls, that he realised the role locks played in Shia Islam and Persian culture. In Iran public water houses were built in bazaars and neighbourhoods and during the hot summers passers-by would stop to take a sip of water. Gradually people started to make donations and the water houses became shrine-like decorated with imagery of the imams.

Read More: Iran’s Most Celebrated Visual Artist, Parviz Tanavoli, Speaks to MEMO About His Work

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.

Read More: Sculptor Finds Himself in the Crossfire of Iran’s Culture Wars

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who was born in Qazvin, Iran, educated in Berkeley, California and is currently based in New York. Her earliest work as a photographer was born out of a trip back to Iran in 1993 where she explored concepts of exile and identity under a feminine lens. In the late nineties, she devoted herself to a series of stark, black and white video installations that referenced contradictions of gender in society. Breaking away from photography, she turned to cinema and directed her first feature-length film, “Women Without Men,” which won the 2009 Venice Film Festival Silver Lion award for best directing. Most recently, Neshat was honored by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with a 2014 Crystal Award. The award is given annually to artists who have made contributions to improving the state of the world.

Read More: Exiled Iranian Artist Shirin Neshat Looks at the Egyptian Revolution

International sanctions imposed against Iran over its disputed nuclear program are affecting all areas of Iranian life. Lately, inflation and a severely depreciated currency have begun to bite in a segment of society that seems far removed from debates over uranium enrichment and “possible military dimensions”: Tehran’s artistic class.

Read More: Iranian Artists Hit by Sanctions

In this interview, the well-known sculpture-artist Farzin Hedayatzadeh presents some thoughts on the state of contemporary visual art in Iran.

Read More: Farzin Hedayatzadeh