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SHE WHO SEES THE UNKNOWN: KABOUS, THE RIGHT WITNESS AND THE LEFT WITNESS
February 2020 -
She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness, commissioned by The Shed, features a VR film, sculptures, and a bedroom installation. Upon entering a bedroom modeled after my childhood room in Iran, the audience will lie down on a daybed and put on a VR headset to view a film about Kabous, a jinn who brings nightmare and sleep paralysis to human body. Surrounding the bed are two 3D-printed sculptures of the ‘witnesses’ of Kabous (I have re-appropriated these two witnesses from different illustrations and named them the fictional characters of The Right Witness and The Left Witness).
— Morehshin Allahyari
As soon as the audience puts the VR headsets on, she/he is possessed by Kabous and then taken to a Hamam (public bathhouse) where the stories of four generations of women (my grandmother, mother, myself, and an imagined monstrous daughter) are told. Historically in Iran, public bathhouses were an important intimate social space for women to gather alone, while the bathhouse is also known as a chosen visiting place for jinn. Through this purposeful choice of hamam as the main architectural space, the audience is moved through multiple spaces and positions to hear the story of my grandmother’s first encounter with a jinn which coincides with a bombing of her village in Kurdistan by the Iraqi government. In the hamam, we hear my mother reading from her diary in Iran which she wrote when she was pregnant with my sister and I during the Iran-Iraq war. Then we hear stories told by me 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.
Credits
* Direction, Concept, Writing, & Installation: Morehshin Allahyari
* VR Development: Pariah Interactive
* Production: Lillyan Ling
* Engineering: Prashast Thapan
* Software Maintenance: Unnat Ramjiyani
* 3D Art: Morehshin Allahyari, Eva Khoury, and Halime Maloof
* Sound Design: Prince Harvey
* Diary Voiceover: Mitra Kassa
* Singing: Delina Zand Karimi and Fereshteh Khalediyan
* Hamam Research Assistance: Negin Tabatabae
* Special thanks: Shaina Yang, Arezoo Allahyari, Sally Glass, and Emily Martinez
Image credit: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness, 2019. VR video. Courtesy of the artist.
Press
* The Believer: "The Process: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness, 2019"
