3/16 Performance-Lecture: On Speculation and Closure

Close up image of a woman in front of a wood background with a patterned vest

Performance-Lecture: On Speculation and Closure

Monday, March 16th from 4-6pm

340 Stephens Hall

Join Iranian Studies and Morehshin Allahyari, Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University for performance-lecture “On Speculation and Closure.” 

In this performance-lecture, Allahyari explores how colonial histories and technological practices can unsettle the notion of closure and at times openings in the afterlives of displaced cultural objects. Drawing on her research into digital colonialism, archives, and storytelling, Allahyari proposes speculation as both a poetic and political method—a way to reopen sealed histories, reanimate displaced artifacts, and envision futures that were foreclosed.

Topics

Spring 2026 Lecture Series topic page

The talk expands on her inquiry into the movement, dispossession, and temporal significance of Islamic divinatory and protective objects from Iran, such as magic bowls, amulets, and talismans, now scattered across Western museum collections. These objects, once tools of protection and divination, become case studies for how imperial power transforms living spiritual technologies into static relics. Allahyari reimagines them not as artifacts of a closed past, but as speculative instruments—technologies of futurity whose potential endures if we learn to listen otherwise; suggesting that speculation allows us to re-tune our temporal perception and re-establish the continuity between protection, divination, and futurity that these objects once promised.

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره‌شین اللهیاری‎) is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist who uses 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication to re-figure myth and history. Also, Morehshin is an assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University. 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 an artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco, the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin, Eyebeam’s one year Research Residency, Pioneer Works, and Harvest Works. 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 in over 100 publications, including books, academic articles, and dissertation chapters. She is the recipient of the Gold Art Prize (2025), 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.

Presented by UC Berkeley’s Iranian Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

This event is free & open to the public.