Arts Walk November 2026: Tijuana – Tehran w/ Yalda Sepahpour

Yalda Sepahpour | @yalda_sepahpour 

Tijuana – Tehran 

The I.E. El Futuro es el Sur

Thursday 11.05. 6pm – 9pm

(Arts Walk)

Yalda Sepahpour is a large-scale painter from Tehran, Iran currently living and working out of Tijuana. Her work is inspired by antiquity, spontaneity in nature, and strength in femininity. She typically works between 14 and 19 feet, oil on canvas.

Yalda’s collection, Tijuana-Tehran, commemorates the joy and fervor of the Iranian National Football Team’s stay in Tijuana during the 2026 World Cup. Her mural, “Never Tamed…”, was mounted to a fletes truck and ventured from TJ to LA to circle the stadium during matches. It inspires us not to look upwards, towards hegemons, but instead towards the South, towards los de abajo, where an insurgent subaltern epistemology may have solutions for the ensuing crises humanity will have to confront. For many of the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable populations have long developed the skills, know-how, and sociality to live resiliently within a system where odds are stacked against them. It is a prefiguration of what is to come beyond what a border or ethnicity can confine. The collection draws inspiration from tercermundismo and South-South dialog.

Yalda recently released the first-ever published Persian-language cocktail recipe book inspired by Iranian, West Asian, and Eastern Mediterranean flavors.