Objective: Urban murals are among the most influential forms of visual media in public spaces, serving not only aesthetic purposes but also playing a significant role in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of cultural, social, and political meanings. This study aims to analyze the semantic system of urban murals in Tehran based on Roland Barthes' semiotic approach and to examine audience decoding practices through Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding theory.
Methods:This study adopted a qualitative research approach. The research population consisted of urban murals displayed in major squares and public thoroughfares of Tehran between 2019 and 2025. Using purposive sampling, murals with the greatest semantic richness were selected for analysis. The data were analyzed according to Barthes' two levels of signification - denotation and connotation - as well as Hall's concepts of representation, encoding, and decoding.
Results:The findings indicate that Tehran's urban murals construct ideological and mythical meanings through the deliberate organization of visual elements, colors, composition, textual components, and symbolic representations across three major thematic domains: social, cultural–religious, and political. Furthermore, Hall's theoretical framework suggests that these encoded messages may be interpreted through dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings, depending on the audiences' cultural, social, and political backgrounds.
Conclusions: Urban murals can be understood as active communicative media that contribute to the construction of collective memory, cultural identity, and social and political discourse. Nevertheless, meaning is neither fixed nor absolute; rather, it emerges through the interaction between the encoded visual text and the audience's decoding process. Consequently, a single visual text may generate multiple interpretations across different audiences.