Morehshin Allahyari, هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini, Friday Late - Wild Digits at Victoria & Albert Museum, 2024.
هم نشینی/Ha’m-neshini (translated from Farsi as “sitting together”) is a discussion and storytelling series with a focus on the global south, organized and moderated by Morehshin Allahyari.
2024 Edition
This edition, featuring Salar Mameni, Zein Majali and Aziza Kadyri, will consider technology in relation to knowledge, value, power and visibility – themes embedded into Allahyari’s new digital commission, Speculations on Capture, currently on display in the V&A Photography Centre.
Speculations on Capture is a poetic film that delves into the histories of astronomical instruments from Iran and Pakistan, now housed at the V&A. Allahyari masterfully blends fact and fiction to speculate on lost encounters, diverted knowledge, and cultural histories rendered inaccessible due to displacement.
This event is part of Victoria & Albert Museum Friday Late – Wild Digits, Friday 29th November, 6:30-10pm.
It is a free, drop-in event hosted in the National Art Library, and booking is not required.
The commission is supported by the Manitou Fund, Kevin, Rosemary and Hannah Rose McNeely. On display until 23rd February 2025.
2022 Edition
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.
Participating Artists
Shiraz Fazli
Bahareh K.
Nooshin Rostami
Zelikha Zohra Shoja
Morehshin Allahyari (Moderator)
2021 Edition
A Hamneshini Event on Survival Justice with Morehshin Allahyari for the Asia Society Museum.
Hosted by artist, activist, and writer Morehshin Allahyari, Ha’mneshi (Farsi for “sitting together”) is a series of poetic rituals and personal storytellings conducted by Allahyari in collaboration with guest speakers Nima Behravan, Angelina Marie Michael Meitzler, and members of the viewing audience.
Using the story of Huma (حمة) as a point of departure and the framework of survival justice, the event seeks to re-figure, unfold, and re-consider the popular phrase “we are all in this together.”