Art Dubai Digital: Moreshin Allahyari

On the occasion of Art Dubai Digital 2026, five artists were invited to respond to a shared set of questions about their practice, their planned project for Art Dubai Digital, and the curatorial framework “Myth of the Digital”, which considers how technology shapes contemporary narratives of authorship, spirituality, and the body. This text presents the answers of Morehshin Allahyari who reclaims myth through feminist and anticolonial methodologies, using digital tools to reactivate suppressed narratives.

What themes or questions are guiding your practice right now?

Moreshin Allahyari. I work as an archaeologist of technologies, investigating them the same way historians examine artifacts of the past. Since 2014, I’ve worked primarily by adapting technologies such as 3D printing and 3D scanning. I use and reappropriate these technologies as tools for reconfiguration and resistance to colonial power structures.

I’ve also been looking into the concept of Digital Colonialism. My definition of Digital Colonialism is “a framework for critically examining the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations.”

Currently, I am working on a new body of work that focuses on the history of sciences and technological instruments of the past. My project will act as a space for reconsidering and reclaiming new possibilities of thinking about the history of technology and sciences, while also pushing boundaries by exploring futurity and futurism away from the common tired assumptions of our times.

What defines the project you’re presenting at Art Dubai Digital?

Moreshin Allahyari. I will present two bodies of work: two velvet prints and a video installation from my ماه طلعت Moon-faced series (2021–2023) and a wall installation and sculptures from سرالاسرار (Secret of Secrets), which is a new work that I’m presenting to the public for the first time.

In Moon-faced I draw on the ancient Persian term ماه طلعت “moon-faced,” a genderless adjective once used to describe beauty in both men and women, but which in contemporary Iran has come to refer almost exclusively to women.

سرالاسرار (Secret of Secrets) forms part of my current research into Islamic manuscripts and medieval scientific devices, engaging with alchemy within the Islamicate world as both a scientific and philosophical practice. Central to the work is distillation, understood not only as a chemical process but as the purification and elevation of essence and soul. Secrecy (سر) functions as a protective technology: knowledge is encoded through symbols, allegory, poetic fragments, and temporal delay to guard its transformative power from extraction or misuse.

"I ask what we can learn from the scientists and scholars of medieval Islam who saw no separation between science and metaphysics, between magic and technology. Often I imagine what our world might look like if we understood these domains not as divided, but as deeply interconnected and in need of one another."

How does Myth of the Digital resonate with your practice and thinking?

Moreshin Allahyari. My current research examines the history of scientific and technological inventions during the Islamic Golden Era (8th–15th century) through a feminist and anticolonial lens, investigating how technological knowledge has been shaped, displaced, or obscured by imperial and colonial narratives.

I ask what we can learn from the scientists and scholars of medieval Islam who saw no separation between science and metaphysics, between magic and technology. Often I imagine what our world might look like if we understood these domains not as divided, but as deeply interconnected and in need of one another.

Art Dubai Digital 2026: Morehshin Allahyari

_artists on "Myth of the digital"