Morehshin Allahyari
Morehshin Allahyari, (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری ), is a NY and Oakland based Iranian-Kurdish artist and assistant professor at Stanford University, using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Archittectura, New Museum, Pompidou Center, Tate Modern, and has an upcoming solo exhbibition at the V&A engaging with the colonial history of their Islamic collection.
ماه طلعت Moon-faced
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 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.