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SPECULATIONS ON CAPTURE | Film Screening w/ Morehshin Allahyari in Conversation with Usha Iyer

Gray Area is pleased to present Speculations on Capture (2024), a new film by Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist Morehshin Allahyari.

SPECULATIONS ON CAPTURE | Film Screening
w/ Morehshin Allahyari in Conversation with Usha Iyer

- Doors at 7
- Intro talk at 7:30
- Film screening 7:45 (35 mins)
- Conversation + Q&A: 8:20 - 8:50
- Bar / cocktail hour: 8:50 - 9:30

All ages

Seated

View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.

About the Event

Originally commissioned by the UK’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Speculations on Capture continues Morehshin Allahyari’s practice of using 3D simulation, digital fabrication, archival methods, and storytelling as tools to deconstruct Western technological colonialism.

Following the screening, Stanford professor Usha Iyer will join Allahyari for a rich discussion on the film, history, and myth-making, and the power of media to refigure imperialist legacies, followed by a Q&A with the audience. After the program, stick around for a cocktail hour in Gray Area’s lobby in the presence of the speakers.

Speculations on Capture and the associated program are presented with support from the San Francisco Arts Commission as part of the Shaping Legacy initiative: a multi-year equity-focused commitment to critically examine the monuments and memorials in San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection.

About Speculations on Capture

The V&A houses one of the largest collections of Islamic art in the world, with over 19,000 objects spanning the 7th to the early 20th century. Allahyari’s poetic film explores the histories of astronomical instruments crafted in Iran and Pakistan, now held within the museum’s collection. Dating from the 1200s to the 1700s, each object was digitally reconstructed in 3D for this project and appears in the film alongside archival documents and historical photographs. The museum’s records, capturing only fragments of these objects’ narratives, document their arrival between 1865 and 1930, yet provide little insight into how their displacement affected their places of origin and the people connected to them. Their journeys reflect the colonial histories that have shaped Western museum collections.

Born and raised in Tehran, Allahyari extends these incomplete narratives, merging historical facts with speculative fiction to imagine lost encounters, diverted knowledge, and inaccessible cultural histories. Her work disrupts conventional museum frameworks, challenging the power dynamics of institutional collections while re-establishing connections between objects and their original histories, cultures, and communities. By transcending the limitations of archives, Allahyari envisions alternative pasts and possible futures for these artefacts.

Allahyari has been instrumental in conceptualising the term “digital colonialism,” describing how technological tools can perpetuate colonial power structures. She reinterprets the act of scanning as an embodied, performative gesture with open-ended political implications, proposing, “Put it to use. Let it colonize the colonizers.” In her work, Allahyari engages with replicas of Middle Eastern cultural artefacts, narrating their long histories as symbols and relics while simultaneously performing ritualised 3D scans of each object. She explores how digital reconstruction can function as a means of reclaiming narratives, revealing technology’s capacity to either erase or preserve cultural memory.

About the Artists

Morehshin Allahyari

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره‌شین اللهیاری‎), is a Bay Area 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).

Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, MoMa, Victoria and Albert Museum, Queens Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, Taipei. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, and Al Jazeera, among others. Morehshin’s work has been the subject of critical analysis across books, academic articles, and dissertation chapters of over 100 publications. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2025), The University of California, Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2024), 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. Morehshin is an assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University.

Usha Iyer

Usha Iyer is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Their research and teaching examine film and media cultures in relation to gender, sexuality, race, and caste. Their book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a study of women’s labor and collaboration. Their current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean, studies the affective engagements of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema and the impact of Caribbean performance cultures on Indian film industries. They are co-editing the volume, Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves, with Manishita Dass.

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