According to the Qur’an, the people of Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj spread great mischief on earth and represent chaos, so Allah gave Zulqarnain (also in other stories interpreted as Alexander The Great) the power to build an iron wall to detain them, separating them from humans. In the prophecy, the Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj present a looming threat – that one day the wall will crumble and their release will precede ‘the end of the days’.

Below are a series of illustrations that I have gathered from multiple resources. These illustrations picture Ya’jooj Ma’jooj, some showing them stuck behind a wall being built or attempting to break through it. The specific illustration I have chosen to work with for this series, is taken from ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt’, (Arabic: عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات‎, meaning Marvels of creatures and Strange things existing). Originally the illustration refers to the figures as monstrous female figures. In my re-telling of their story, I have re-appropriated them as Ya’jooj Ma’jooj.

To view the complete video “She Who Sees The Unknown: Ya’jooj Ma’jooj”, please email morehshin@gmail.com

Finding myself literally “walled out” of the United States during Donald Trump’s first attempt at the Muslim travel ban, the story of Ya’jooj Ma’jooj as those who represent chaos (initially told in the Quran) has a particular pertinence for me. Through re-imagining the power of Ya’jooj Ma’jooj, I use them as figures to re-tell a story of those considered ‘the other’ or ‘monstrous’. Rather than rejecting this monstrosity, I question it and embrace it through telling a poetic story in which Ya’jooj Ma’jooj and their chaos come to break through the wall that is built to keep them out; they become one with the world, only to be pushed back and emerge again in an eternal repeating battle of ‘us vs them’.

This video shows the process of 3D scanning of the sculptures I have 3D modeled and 3D printed from the illustrations of them. In the beginning stages of the video, an undefined pixel mass is turned around and moved across the screen by the invisible hand of the producer. Later, as more visual data is gathered, the body becomes more concrete but never human; it holds true to its initial blueprint, a nine-headed hydra from a 12th century Persian encyclopaedia called Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt.

The narrator (my voice) in the video is the impersonal voice of oral proliferation: at once one voice and all the voices that have passed on the story. The oral history and image-data that are compiled and refigured here makes visible the complicated transformation that ancient myths and objects undergo through time, and how precarious this transition has become through digital appropriation. Formed by raw data, the image becomes dematerialised, which at one point in the film is captured as becoming simultaneously the image and the mirror of an image.

In this VR version of She Who Sees The Unknown: Ya’jooj Ma’jooj, I invite the audience to enter into a shrine-like space where they are allowed to have a limited amount of movement. The space feels dark and mysterious. There are elements such as fire, talismans, the wall in which Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj seem to be sitting in front or behind of. In contrast to a lot of VR pieces in which the audience have to run around and discover things, I want the audience to be still in some sort of meditative mind-set, standing in front of the two figures of Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj which appear to be huge in the VR space (in relationship to the audience height). As their story is told, the audience is invited to follow certain hand gestures and movements to let the story progress and improve, to feel involved but also controlled by the storyteller at the same time.