September 21 – December 1, 2024
32 Lisgar St and Park
Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness is a multi-media installation which addresses passing down the narratives of sisterhood and kinship, motherhood and lineage. It engages with intergenerational trauma caused by war, displacement, and birthing injustice. The installation represents the artist’s childhood room in Tehran, Iran, accompanied by two 3D-printed sculptures, and a VR film that immerses the viewer with personal stories.
Hovering above the viewer’s head are two sculptural jinn figures, named the Right Witness and the Left Witness. These mythical spirits later emerge in the VR film as companions of Kabous, a powerful jinn associated with sleep paralysis and nightmares. Throughout these encounters the viewer is virtually situated in a hammam (public bathhouse) and guided by the artist through the stories of four generations of women—her grandmother, her mother, herself, and her imagined monstrous daughter.
The VR installation being presented at the Toronto Biennial of Art is the final work in Morehshin Allahyari’s larger project, She Who Sees the Unknown (2016-2022), which is shaped around the stories of monstrous female/queer creatures, known as Jinn in Perso-Arabic lore and mythology. Through a process she terms “re-figuring” Allahyari revisits the forgotten stories of these figures while embracing their monstrosity and overlooked powers.
She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness is curated by Nima Esmailpour as part of the 2024 Curatorial Fellowship program.
Made possible with the generous support of TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment and the Ontario Arts Council.
Bio
Artist Bio
Morehshin Allahyari
Morehshin Allahyari (1985; she/her, Persian: موره شین اللهیاری), is a NY-based Iranian-Kurdish artist 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). Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops at venues throughout the world, including the New Museum, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale di Architecture, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst among many others. She is the recipient of The United States Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019), and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Her artworks are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Current Museum. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.
Exhibition Site
32 Lisgar St and Park
32 Lisgar St
Toronto ON
M6J 0C7