Prix
The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
She Who Sees The Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness, and The Left Witness
morehshin allahyari
This work features a VR film, a bedroom installation, and two sculptures. Upon entering a bedroom modeled after the artist's childhood room in Iran, the viewer lays down on a daybed and puts on a VR headset to view a film about Kabous, a jinn who brings nightmare and sleep paralysis to the human body. Surrounding the bed are two 3D-printed sculptures of the ‘witnesses’ of Kabous (fictional characters which have been re-appropriated from different illustrations and named The Right Witness and The Left Witness). As soon as the viewer puts the VR headsets on, they are possessed by Kabous and then taken to a Hammam (public bathhouse), where the stories of four generations of women (the artist's grandmother, mother, the artist herself, and an imagined monstrous daughter) are told. Historically in Iran, public bathhouses were an important intimate social space for women to gather alone; the bathhouse is also known as a chosen visiting place for jinn. Through this purposeful choice of hammam as the main architectural space, the audience is moved through multiple spaces and positions to hear the story of the grandmother’s first encounter with a jinn, which coincides with a bombing of her village in Kurdistan by the Iraqi government. In the hammam, we hear Allahyari's mother reading from her diary, which she wrote when she was pregnant during the Iran-Iraq war. Then the viewer hears stories told by the artist 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. The series to which this work belongs, She Who Sees The Unknown, is a long-term research based project which focuses on the recreation of monstrous female and queer figures of Middle Eastern origin.