In the early 1990s, a loose collective of Iranian artists installed their work in an empty single family villa that was scheduled to be demolished and replaced by an apartment building. The artists did not use the empty walls and spaces as a gallery; they used them as the medium for their art. Taking advantage of the emptied nooks and crannies of what had been private family space, the artists lavished their individual and collective attention on site-specific installations: wall paintings of dinner parties; carpets of fragmented household items; taxidermy birds in storage areas. The project is remembered and referred to, but there is almost no documentation of the actual art; it was all destroyed when the house was demolished. This was intentional. As much as the project was a striking challenge to the pristine white cube aesthetics of conventional gallery spaces, it was an eloquent testimonial to the evanescence of material being: of the art, of the house, of the city. Known as the Khaneh Kolangi (the house that is to be knocked down), the beauty of the collective project, made up of its individual installations, was its willful, upstart challenge to the supposed limitations on creative agency in the face of dominant cultural, political, and market forces. This paper focuses on the Khaneh Kolangi, and several related arts projects of the same period. All of these projects were collective efforts, and all made use of unconventional and/or rejected spaces to create something new by pointedly adapting the available structures of earlier sites and traditions of making. The limitations of Iranian post-revolutionary life pushed these artists to adapt alternative methods and visions, and to directly engage in a process of critique of the conditions of cultural production. The artists positioned their work within the conceptual framework of public art (projects freely available to a general audience and intended as an intervention into shared social life), but very differently, in medium and message, from the better known, better documented Iranian examples of state approved public art (outdoor building murals and sculptures). Based on interviews with artists who were involved in the projects, as well as other artists and cultural producers who connect the principles of their dissident contemporary work to the example of the Khaneh Kolangi, this paper explores how these alternative projects disrupted assumed relationships between authority and freedom in both aesthetic and political terms.