She Who Sees The Unknown

Kabous/Al-Kabus, known also as Al-Jathoom (which means nightmare), is a  jinn belonging to the race of those who bring different ailments, trauma, and nightmares to humans. She is depicted as a jinn possessing a human with a nightmare, sitting on their chest while they are asleep. In Kitab-Albulhan and The Book of Felicity (the images below), Al-Kabus is illustrated accompanied by two or three other jinn. 

She Who Sees The Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness, The Left Witness(2019)

She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness (2019), commissioned by The Shed, features a VR film, sculptures, and a bedroom installation. Upon entering a bedroom modeled after my childhood room in Iran, the audience will lie down on a daybed and put on a VR headset to view a film about Kabous, a jinn who brings nightmare and sleep paralysis to human body. Surrounding the bed are two 3D-printed sculptures of the ‘witnesses’ of Kabous (I have re-appropriated these two witnesses from different illustrations and named them the fictional characters of The Right Witness and The Left Witness). 

As soon as the audience puts the VR headsets on, she/he is possessed by Kabous and then taken to a Hamam (public bathhouse) where the stories of four generations of women (my grandmother, mother, myself, and an imagined monstrous daughter) are told. Historically in Iran, public bathhouses were an important intimate social space for women to gather alone, while the bathhouse is also known as a chosen visiting place for jinn. Through this purposeful choice of hamam as the main architectural space, the audience is moved through multiple spaces and positions to hear the story of my grandmother’s first encounter with a jinn which coincides with a bombing of her village in Kurdistan by the Iraqi government. In the hamam, we hear my mother reading from her diary in Iran which she wrote when she was pregnant with my sister and I during the Iran-Iraq war. Then we hear stories told by me on sanctions, monstrosity, and motherhood, ending with an imagined monstrous daughter who is birthed to heal our ancestors and our future generations of daughters to come. In short, this VR film provides the opportunity to revisit the complexities of motherhood, war, childbirth, kinship and the possible manifestation of epigenetic trauma, stored in DNA through generations.

Written, created, and directed by Morehshin Allahyari; VR development by Pariah Interactive; Sound design by Prince Harvey; Diary text and voiceover by Mitra Kassai; Singing by Delina Zand Karimi and Fereshteh Khalediyan; Hamam research assistance by Negin Tabatabaei; Modeling assistance by Halime Maloof and Eva Khoury; Special thanks to Shaina Yang, Arezoo Allahyari, Sally Glass, Emily Martinez, and Lillyan Ling for further assistance.