Based on drawings of the jinn Zoba’ah (زوبعة) from the 14th and 16th centuries, the Iranian-born artist Morehshin Allahyari has 3D modeled the sculpture Zoba’ah (زوبعة): The Whirlwind for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s virtual collection. In pre-Islamic and Islamic theology, a jinn is an intelligent spirit known as a shape-shifter created from smokeless fire, who exists in a parallel world. Along with humans and angels, the jinn are one of Allah’s three sentient creatures. Nevertheless, in contrast to angels who exclusively obey, jinn have their own will and agency. They are both good and evil, and show up when catastrophic situations appear to humans.

Combining activism, cultural history, and technology, Morehshin Allahyari challenges contemporary norms in her works and asks what kind of future we want to live in. In previous projects, she has used 3D printing to reconstruct ancient sculptures destroyed by ISIS and inserted data files into them to be read in the future. Likewise, the work Zoba’ah (زوبعة): The Whirlwind is a commissioned work by the museum as part of Allahyari’s long-term project She Who Sees the Unknown, for which she re-figures, 3D models, scans and prints monstrous queer figures that examine contemporary colonialism, patriarchal structures, and environmental destruction. Allahyari thus highlights and reinterprets the female or queer figures of the past and creates counterparts to the contemporary idea of the masculine hero.

Allahyari approaches the Middle East’s political events and cultural histories with an internal critical eye. Simultaneously, she is aware of not falling prey to the West’s dominant binary understanding of the Middle East. Instead, she points to the troubles of our world that are initiated from a long history of Western colonialism and so, in 2015, Allahyari coined the concept of ‘digital colonialism’, addressing how today’s digital infrastructures are often anchored in the imperial logics of the past. She specifically points out how Western archaeological institutions and private companies 3D-scan artefacts in the Middle East and Africa, after which they patent the files and control who can access them – just as Western museums in colonial times took physical artefacts back to their home countries. Consequently, as a Western museum exhibiting and collecting 3D printable works, it was an obvious choice to invite Allahyari as the second artist to the Virtual Sculptures project, to take a new critical look at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s own practices and to expand the collection’s cultural resonance.