Please join the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the opening of our latest exhibition, “Morehshin Allahyari: She Who Sees the Unknown“. Doors at 7 PM, event begins at 7:30 PM. The evening will include a lecture from the artist, Morehshin Allahyari. Reception to follow inside of the MacKenzie cafe, Craft Services.

Curated by John G. Hampton and organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Friday, May 24, 2019 at 7 PM – 10 PM
MacKenzie Art Gallery
3475 Albert Street, Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 6X6

“She Who Sees the Unknown” is a new body of work by New York-based Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari that creates a space for reverence towards the “monstrous other” in an age of digital colonialism. This new media installation consists of three shrines to female and non-binary jinn (dark goddesses colloquially known as “genies”) of Middle Eastern origin. Allahyari creates these spaces through practices of magic and poetic-speculative storytelling, re-appropriation of traditional mythologies, collaging, meshing, 3D scanning/3D printing, and archiving to explore acts of “re-figuring” as a feminist/activist artistic practice.

This exclusive exhibition at the MacKenzie will include three installations: Huma, Aisha Qandisha, and The Laughing Snake. Alongside these three installations, the MacKenzie will be displaying the first stages of Allahyari’s growing archive of dark goddesses and jinn figures in a research-oriented “reading room.” Since no such archive currently exists, Allahyari is undergoing active research with collaborators and first hand texts and objects, which will eventually be compiled into a book that will be freely distributed through a web archive.