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For the last several years, artist Morehshin Allahyari has been exploring cultural and historic preservation at the intersection of art, technology, history and terrorism. Join Morehshin for an extraordinary evening of ideas as she explores the first in her ongoing project, Material Speculation.

Material Speculation is a digital fabrication and 3D printing project that inspects Petropolitical and poetic relationships between 3D Printing, Plastic, Oil, Technocapitalism and Jihad. The first series “Material Speculation: ISIS” is an in progress 3D modeling and 3D printing project focused on the reconstruction of selected (original) artifacts (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. “Material Speculation: ISIS” creates a practical and political possibility for artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool both for resistance and documentation. It intends to use 3D printing as a process for repairing history and memory.

Morehshin Allahyari is a new media artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work extensively deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects; a poetic mean to document the personal and collective lives we live and our struggles as humans in the 21st century. Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Pori Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Miami Art fair, and Material Art fair. She has been an artist in residence at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), and BANFF Centre (2013), among others.

Her work has been featured in NYTimes, Huffington Post, Wired, NPR, VICE, Parkett Art Magazine, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Dazed Digital, Neural Magazine, Global Voices Online, and Al Jazeera among others. Morehshin is the Co-Founder of the Experimental Research Lab at Pier9/Autodesk.

Learn more about Morehshin’s Material Speculation project at morehshin.com.