Breaching Towards Other Futures

Performance Lecture



 

Taragh is a sound
of stamping one’s foot on the ground.

Taragh
Taragh
Taragh
Taragh
Taragh
Taragh

 

With its repetition, Tarigh (path) is created.

 





For this performance, Morehshin Allahyari and Shirin Fahimi channel the revelation of a jinn figure Aisha Qandisha and Ilm al-raml (Geomancy – science of the sand) as their methods for telling and opening doors towards other futures. Aisha Qandisha is one of the most honored and fearsome jinn in Islam. She is known as ‘the opener’. When she possesses humans, she does not take over the host but rather opens them to the outside; to a storm of incoming jinn and demons, making them a traffic zone of cosmodromic data. Ilm al-raml refers to the foresight that the Earth holds with itself. Through its practice, this foresight is revealed and future is seen, known, and breached.



“Ramali comes from pre-Islamic Arab origin, we are told that it was practiced initially by precarious “city dwellers” who had just been introduced to urban life but had no occupations. So they invented a craft they called “sand writing” in order to make a living. But they also found it difficult to establish the altitude of stars by means of instruments and to find the adjusted positions of the stars through calculation. Therefore they invented their combinations of figures. For sixteen combinations they created existence of sixteen houses. Each house is a natural element that correspond to the 12 zodiac and four cardines. The sky became their sphere for imagination and data, they became the receivers and translators on earth.

It is this potential of time traveling that gives Oml-Ol Raml and I control and possession over a future unknown and unreachable to others.”



Credits



Mask Design

Sahar Sepahdari with assistance by Alexandra Heine and Setare S. Arashloo

Costume Design

Shahla Sakaki and Mahin Sakaki

Sound

Prince Harvey

This performance and multiple iterations of it were supported by a Pioneer Works Tech Residency, Rubin Museum of Art, Projekt Bauhaus, and Arch+ magazine.



Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism

Performance Lecture



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.


Sponsors


New Museum and Rhizome public programs are made possible, in part, through the support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.


Morehshin Allahyari received a grant as part of the 2019 Rhizome Commissions Program, which is supported by Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.


Re-Figuring

Re-Figuring Event


(an intimate conversation in the format of un-panelling and reclaiming time, the past, and the future)

May 27, 2017 At Eyebeam

With Morehshin Allahyari, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Nooshin Rostami, Ida Momennejad, and Maryam Darvishi

Documentation by Supreet Mahanti



This event focused on “re-figuring” and fabulation as an activist, feminist practice of reimagining the past in order to create multiple alternative worlds and futures.

For Re-Figuring, I invited four artists, activists, and scientists (Gelare Khoshgozaran, Nooshin Rostami, Ida Momennejad, and Maryam Darvishi) to create ‘Fabulation Stations’—spaces where they will perform poetic, mythical, and speculative stories that mesh past, present and future forms of colonialism. These stories are examples of oral storytelling that resist being written out as new grand narratives.




MAP Amplify!

Public Art


Leveraging the power of art and design to advance the front lines of social justice.

http://amplifyjustice.org

http://amplifyjustice.org/islamaphobia.html


Ethnic bias and stereotyping erode the stability of American families.



Dangerous political rhetoric has contributed to a significant rise in incidents of Islamophobic bias in the United States and abroad. From 2014 to 2016, anti-Muslim bias incidents jumped 65 percent. In that two-year period, hate crimes targeting Muslims surged 584 percent.

Religious beliefs were not the only trigger of anti–Muslim bias incidents. The victim’s ethnicity or national origin accounted for 35 percent of the total, and in many cases an individual’s name was the lone trigger factor. Xenophobic policies and propaganda exert a heavy human toll; increasingly, families are torn apart by regressive immigration policies based on ethnic profiling. In American schools, reports of violence and bullying of Muslim students continue to rise and, alarmingly, some of the reported incidents involve faculty rather than other students. Islamophobia, xenophobia and discrimination do not have to be our reality. Together, we can reject hate and unburden our nation from continued a affliction.




CAIR - Council on American-Islamic Relations

CAIR-NY is the New York state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the leading Muslim civil rights organization in the Nation.

Council on American-Islamic Relations

CAIR-NY is the New York state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the leading Muslim civil rights organization in the Nation. Our mission is to protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. Through legal representation, education and advocacy, CAIR-NY empowers the American Muslim community, encouraging their participation in political and social activism. CAIR–NY counsels and advocates on behalf of Muslims who have experienced discrimination, harassment or hate crimes.