Tehran's 29th International Rug Expo

Editors note: Report and photos from Tehran by Daniel Bikas, an Iranian rug designer based in Tabriz with primary focus on wall rugs.

As a handmade rug designer and producer from Tabriz, I attended at the expo after two years of consecutive cancellation due to corona pandemic.

Visiting expo can be done for various reasons for visitors. In general, some people come here to buy their favourite rug amongst too many options which needs good knowledge to choose the best one in terms of price and quality. For people who are in rug business it can be getting familiar with new designs, innovation in material preparation,networking and etc.

For convenience of readers, I decided to highlight the key points of the Expo separately.

Tehran’s 29th International Rug Expo held between 22-28 of August 2022 which is last season of summer in Iran.
More than 400 top Iranian producers were participants in 8 halls in area of 19620 Square meter.
Outbreak of Corona virus caused two years cancellation of this expo.
Presenting and selling of any kind of machine-made and foreign based rugs are prohibited.
Most celebrated cities were: Tabriz, Qom, Isfahan, Kashan, Kerman, Mashhad, Zanjan.
There were different types of rugs in terms of size which varies from A4 paper till 100 square meter.
Most of the rugs are floor ones but wall rugs are growing in popularity.
Different style of rugs were present at the expo for different tastes: full silk, silk-wool, kilim, gabbeh,traditional,modern,antiques and etc.
Unfortunately due to a lot reasons there were few foreign visitors at the expo.
It has been scheduled scheduled a conference for each day of expo with topics like weavers sustainability, employment and social security, export boosting, home-based rug business, design creativity.
There were stalls about rug publications, dying, designing, intellectual property.
The book of 29th expo which was about Iranian top Hand-knotted rug producers information was on sale.