Morehshin Allahyari, Author at Morehshin Allahyari

August 22, 2024

Speculations On Capture (2024)

Allahyari’s poetic film explores the stories of astronomical instruments made in Iran and Pakistan and now held at the V&A. Dating from the 1200s to the 1700s, each object was modelled in 3D specifically for this project and features in the film alongside archival documents and related photographs. The museum’s archives capture only fragments of these objects’ histories. Documents record their arrival between about 1865 and 1930, but there is little sense of how their displacement impacted their places of origin and the people living there. Their journeys reflect imperial histories that have shaped the V&A’s collections.

Born and raised in Tehran, Allahyari expands on these partially told tales. She deliberately combines fact and fiction to speculate on the encounters that have been lost, the knowledge that has been diverted and the cultural histories rendered inaccessible. Allahyari aims to disrupt the museum environment, reframing its imperial power dynamic and realigning objects with their own histories, cultures and people. She lifts fragmented stories beyond the confines of the museum, imagining how the past could have been different and the possibilities the future may hold.

Commission supported by the Manitou Fund, Kevin, Rosemary and Hannah Rose McNeely.

April 17, 2024

The Queer Withdrawings (2022-2023)

The Queer Withdrawings is a site-specific installation of drawings and two sculptural works inspired by an annotated and illustrated archive of manuscripts and other sources of Islamic mythologies and the occult sciences, which can be viewed in full at archive.shewhoseestheunknown.com.

These two mirrored sculptural figures, Qareen i and Qareen ii (Arabic/Farsi: قرين, lit. “constant companion”), offer blessings of healing and protection to their observers. Known as a primarily decorative medium in Iran, mirroring (Farsi: آینهکاری ayeneh-kari lit. “mirror-work”, or قرینهسازی Qareeneh Sazi lit. “to reverse”) is used as an aesthetic revetment in shrines. Mirroring schemas and mirrored-looking sketches furnish the walls, working in tandem with the symmetry found in the other works in the show to balance order and power. a site-specific installation of drawings from an annotated and illustrated archive of manuscripts and other sources of Islamic mythologies and the occult sciences, which can be viewed in full at archive.shewhoseestheunknown.com. The exhibition is accompanied by a text by art historian and educator Nima Esmailpour, which can be read here.

Morehshin Allahyari- The Queer Withdrawings

August 9, 2023

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM, Pt. III: Transnational Feminism: Womxn, Life, Freedom is a Daily Practice

Transnational Feminism: Womxn, Life, Freedom is a Daily Practice

Featuring Aytak Akbari-Dibavar, Shokoofeh Dezfuli, Katayoun Keshavarzi, and Morehshin Allahyari, with Persis M. Karim

Thursday, June 1, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM is an online event series for co-learning, co-growing, solidarity, and kinship with our Iranian siblings. We come together as artists, thinkers, and organizers,mainly in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a refusal of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran. The ongoing “Woman, Life, Freedom” or Jina revolution was sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the regime’s police on September 16, 2022. Ever since, Iran has experienced a nationwide uprising, primarily led by women and marginalized ethnic groups demanding an end to the current Islamic regime and the establishment of a society free of oppression, discrimination, and dictatorship. As our days unfold between hope in the power of the Iranian people’s resistance, and despair from unthinkable violence by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, how might we continue to participate and show solidarity, using “Woman, Life, Freedom is a daily practice” as our mantra? The series explores this question by providing a platform for growth and support through practice-based conversations.

In Pt. III of the series, we will look at centering feminism in the fight against patriarchy and dictatorship, examining feminist struggles as struggles against all modes of oppression including ethnicity, class, and religion Through dialogue, we’ll explore solidarity for Iran beyond words, and what a truly transnational feminism looks like.

Aytak Dibavar (she/they) is an Iranian activist, artist, and professor of Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University, Canada. Aytak’s work/research are entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production as well as creative/art-based teaching practices. She researches and writes about race, gender, memory, political trauma and silence. Aytak has a great passion for people and their lived experiences. She is interested in life-narratives; how individuals navigate and interpret their own stories, including whether and how they choose to share them with others or remain silent. As an artist, Aytak not only finds solace and self-expression through painting and poetry but also incorporates these art forms into their daily life and pedagogical practices.

Shokoofeh Dezfuli is an Iranian artist and writer based in Pennsylvania. Her work centers around transnational feminism, community care, and the pursuit of ecological and social justice. Shokoofeh aims to shed light on the intricate power dynamics present in social structures, with the goal of sparking conversations and inspiring transformative action. By exploring feminist ethics of care, she hopes to challenge existing paradigms and imagine new ways to collectively combat systems of oppression.

Katayoun Keshavarzi was born in Iran in 1980, and moved to Sweden in 2009. Since then, Keshavarzi has started a publishing company and worked as an interpreter, translator and teacher, among other things. Through the years, Keshavarzi has been politically active as an intersectional feminist, especially on social media, analyzing and discussing issues related to politics, gender, inequalities, human rights, etc. In 2019, Keshavarzi started studying applied sociological research at Stockholm University and received a Bachelor’s degree in 2022. In Fall 2023, Keshavarzi will begin the second and last year of a masters program in the same field.

May 22, 2023

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM, Pt. II: Online Security and Privacy (2023)

A Practice-based Conversation on Online Security and Privacy with Sarah Aoun

Thursday, April 13, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

In Pt. II of the series, A Practice-based Conversation on Online Security and Privacy with Sarah Aoun, Aoun and Morehshin Allahyari will discuss the basics around digital security, and what it means to be safe online and navigate the internet while safeguarding your information. We will understand how to protect online accounts, how to keep your devices locked down, and what internet security and circumvention means in the context of censorship and internet shutdowns.

Sarah Aoun is a privacy and security researcher. For the past decade, her work has primarily focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable populations around the world. Most recently, she was the CTO and Vice President of Security at the Open Technology Fund, an organization that funds projects focused on countering censorship and surveillance. Sarah has worked as an operational security and counter surveillance trainer, and has served as a cybersecurity consultant for dozens of US and international NGOs. She is currently a New America Fellow, and was a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow (2017-2018), an Internet Freedom Fellow (2016-2017), and was a technical advisor for the Internet Freedom Festival, the Human Rights Foundation, Global Journalist Security, and Reset.

May 22, 2023

WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM: Building Political Power Through Feminist Collective Work (2023)

Feminists for Jina member Manijeh Moradian, Woman* Life Freedom Collective member Ozi Ozar, and a Begoo Collective member join artist Morehshin Allahyari for a conversation. We conclude with a reading by Rooja Mohassessy.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

In Pt. I, Building Political Power Through Feminist Collective Work, Iranian artists, scholars, and organizers, each representing a feminist collective or network, will come together for a conversation moderated by the series organizer and artist Morehshin Allahyari. Grassroots feminist collectives are some of many collective groups formed since the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. Collective action is usually construed as a tool wielded to affect political and societal change. This panel will explore the goals, work ethics, process, and trial- and-error innate to establishing a collective group, and will make a case for how we can build power through feminist collective work.

Feminists for Jina: is a network of feminist collectives and activists from different cities around the world, with diverse lived and learned experiences and viewpoints, united to echo and reinforce the voice of the ongoing “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” Revolution of Iran and to strengthen its transnational elements. Since the beginning of the revolution in Iran, the slogan, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” has brought those of us in the diaspora together and Jina has become the symbol of our fight. The revolution has strengthened our determination to unite in order to achieve our goal of equality and freedom, and to fight alongside the people inside Iran and other feminist liberation movements for making a better world.

Begoo Collective: A collective of Iranian feminists inside and outside of Iran, Begoo Collective is invested in cultivating a transnational dialogue, particularly among the people of the Global South, in solidarity with the uprising of the Iranian people, especially Womxn, the LGBTQ+, and all marginalized communities. Centering JIN JÎYAN AZADÎ (Woman, Life, Freedom) and in a fight against systemic historical erasure, through a feminist, anti-colonial, and transnational lens, Begoo Collective strives to amplify the Iranian people’s acts of bravery and resistance, and to archive the violence and the oppression their bodies continue to endure.

Woman* Life Freedom Collective: The mission of Woman Life Freedom Collective* is to support the resistance in Iran and forge and fortify transnational unity and solidarity beyond group-based political identities and national borders. We aim to respect, echo, and protect the struggle and resistance of people in Iran and call inflicted upon in all groups to do the same. We invite everyone to set aside the differences and demands only to chant in unison the political demands of this moment and this generation: Woman* Life Freedom.

May 22, 2023

هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini (2022)

Join us on Wednesday, January 4 for an evening of informal conversations هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini (translated from Farsi as “sitting together”) in solidarity and kinship with our Afghan and Iranian siblings. We come together as artists and organizers in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a trajectory of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran and Afghanistan. In the tradition of a هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini event, we will use our personal and collective memories and stories as points of departure to raise awareness and imagine together, alongside audience members, what a transnational feminist approach might look like.

Beyond the shared histories of patriarchal violence and control over our bodies, the current parallel political events unfolding in Iran and Afghanistan are reminders that the closer and more attuned we are to one another’s struggles, the more forceful our actions can be in building new models of sisterhood.

As we enter the fourth month of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution in Iran, sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the regime’s police, the Taliban government has seized power in Afghanistan resulting in a ban and further violence preventing girls from attending school and universities (among other edicts restricting women’s lives). Both the Islamic Republic Regime and Taliban use violence and constraints on women’s bodies, freedom of choice, and movement. As we center feminism in the fight against patriarchy and dictatorship, we equally see feminist struggles as struggles against all modes of oppression, including ethnicity, class, and religion. We are not free, until we are all free.

Jin. Jîyan. Azadî.

Womxn. Life. Freedom.

This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition Always In My Heart, curated by Muheb Esmat and currently on view at Smack Mellon.

***هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini is a discussion and storytelling series with a focus on the global south, organized by Morehshin Allahyari since 2017.

Participating Artists

Shiraz Fazli

Bahareh K.

Nooshin Rostami

Zelikha Zohra Shoja

Organized and moderated by Morehshin Allahyari.

January 11, 2022

ماه طلعت / Moon-faced (2022)

In ancient Persian literature, ماه طلعت (Moon-faced) was a genderless adjective used to define beauty in both men and women. In contemporary Iran, it refers to the beauty of women only. Something similar happened, in the world of images, to the Qajar dynasty portrait paintings: the modernization of Iran, the influence of the European tradition of realistic painting, and the use of camera technology and therefore photography as a model, overshadowed and ended the queer representation of genders that historically characterized these paintings, largely known for their gender-undifferentiation. For her project, “ماه طلعت، Moon-faced,” Allahyari uses a carefully researched and chosen series of keywords with a multimodal AI model to generate a series of videos from the Qajar Dynasty painting archive (1786-1925). Through this collaboration, the machine program learns to paint new genderless portraits, in the effort to undo and repair a history of Westernization that ended the course of nonbinary gender representation in the Persian visual culture. The music in this video was composed by Mani Nilchiani.

Morehshin Allahyari, ماه طلعت Moon-faced, Video, Mirror frame, Installation shots.

Moonfaced-Video Installation at Onassis Foundation

Moon-Faced ماه طلعت, Velvet Fragments II, AI-Generated image, dye-sublimation print on velvet in custom frame.

Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism- Performance at New Museum- Morehshin Allahyari and Rosalie Yu

March 13, 2020

Digital Colonialism (2016-2019)

In 2019, I was commissioned to do a lecture-performance in relationship to my research on Digital Colonialism in which I had started to write about and give lectures on since 2016. In simple words, I define Digital Colonialism as a framework for critically examining the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. In my research in the past years, I have specifically focused on these colonial powers in relationship to technologies such as 3D printers and 3d scanners and their use/misuse in the construction of in danger or lost artifacts and cultural heritage of the Middle-East.

In this medium post I have documented some of my research and theories on Digital Colonialism.

Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism

In this performance-lecture, commissioned and presented by New Museum affiliate Rhizome, artist Morehshin Allahyari illuminates her concept of digital colonialism in relation to the technology of 3D printing.

Since 2016, Allahyari has advanced the concept of digital colonialism to characterize the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. This performance focuses on the 3D scanner, which is widely used by archaeologists to capture detailed data about physical artifacts. Describing the device as “a tool of witchcraft and magic,” Allahyari reframes 3D scanning as a performative, embodied act with open-ended political potential. Working with a selection of replicas of cultural artifacts from the Middle East, Allahyari will perform live 3D scans while speaking about the objects’ long histories as symbols and relics and their recent appropriation in digital form by Western institutions, considering how these narratives intersect materially and poetically and how they may be resituated and rewritten.

This event was presented in conjunction with the exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics,” which features works related to Allahyari’s series Material Speculation: ISIS (2015–16). Described by the artist as an exploration of the “petropolitical and poetic relationships between 3D printing, plastic, oil, technocapitalism, and jihad,” the project centers around an effort to 3D print replicas of twelve artifacts from the ancient cities of Hatra and Nineveh, which were destroyed by ISIS in 2015.