Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind
October 28, 2022–January 1, 2024
A Feeling of Healing
November 17, 2022–January 31, 2023
The Museum of Contemporary Art (est. 1991 in Roskilde) collects, researches, and exhibits ephemeral and time-based artworks. To better host these formats and engage new audiences, the museum became an itinerant museum in 2021. This winter, the museum proudly presents an online exhibition by Morehshin Allahyari and an exhibition in a shut-down nightclub by Jacolby Satterwhite.
Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind—a digital exhibition by Morehshin Allahyari
How can we participate in creating the world we want to see and live in? To download artist Morehshin Allahyari’s sculpture Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind you have to agree to a set of “terms and conditions” written by the artist and answer how you will take small actions to change the world in the bigger picture. In this way, you summon Zoba’ah, a creature from the Islamic world, who always brings about sudden change.
Download the work here.
Based on drawings of the jinn Zoba’ah from the 14th and 16th centuries, the Iranian-born artist Morehshin Allahyari has 3D modeled the sculpture Zoba’ah: 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. As one of the most powerful jinn, Zoba’ah, which translates as “whirlwind,” brings immediate change once summoned. Meaningful change is needed, Allahyari believes, in this time of fights for justice, wars, and urgent climate disasters. Therefore, she brings Zoba’ah into virtual space, which has represented a crucial public arena in recent years for transformative movements such as the current Iranian Uprising led by women under the hashtag #MahsaAmini, Arab Spring, anti-imperialist movements in Hong Kong, the EndSARS uprising in Nigeria, the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, and the Me Too movement.
A Feeling of Healing by Jacolby Satterwhite
Via virtual reality, video installations, and neon works, the artist Jacolby Satterwhite shows us how dance and music can be used as shields by marginalized persons against their treatment by society. Nightclubs are celebrated in several of the artist’s works as places where, historically, a different and freer life for Black and queer persons has flourished. For that reason, the exhibition A Feeling of Healing is staged in an old shut-down nightclub in Roskilde as an occasion to imagine possible safer spaces in the town.
We move through computer-generated worlds and oceanic coastal areas in Satterwhite’s imaginative works, tapping into sources ranging from Nigerian mythology, video games, pop culture, and art history. The artist is known for creating mythical digital worlds, wherein avatars often move to electronic rhythms - showing us modes of existence as both Black and queer persons in response to the surrounding world. Similarly, his mother, Patricia Satterwhite, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, found peace in the world of fantasy where, during periods of despair and joblessness, she designed household products in the hope of patenting her ideas. Satterwhite has transformed his mother’s drawings into 3D animations as a general feature in his works, and her homemade recordings have become electronic music made with the producer Nick Weiss, providing the soundtrack to all the works, giving his mother’s calming voice a divine and ubiquitous character.
Read more about A Feeling of Healing.
