Morehshin Allahyari: The Laughing Snake

2018

A dark, evocative, computer-generated image of a black snake with a feminine face.

Morehshin Allahyari’s hypertext narrative The Laughing Snake uses the myth of a jinn—a supernatural creature or monstrous figure in Arabian mythology—to explore the status of women and the female body in the Middle East. According to the myth appearing in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript Kitab al-bulhan (Book of Wonders), the Laughing Snake terrorizes a city, murdering its people and animals as numerous attempts to kill her fail. An old man finally destroys the snake by holding up a mirror to her, which makes her laugh so hard at her reflection that she dies. Using images of the snake and the mirror, Allahyari allows readers to navigate through a labyrinthine online narrative that mixes personal and imagined stories to address themes of femininity, sexual abuse, morality, and hysteria. The snake emerges as a complex figure, reflecting multifaceted and sometimes distorted views of women, and refracting images of otherness and monstrosity. The Laughing Snake is part of Allahyari’s ongoing project She Who Sees The Unknown (2017–), in which she researches dark goddesses and fiendish female figures of Middle Eastern origin to explore how symbolic meanings embedded in traditions and myths often surface in contemporary forms of oppression.

This project is co-commissioned with Liverpool Biennial and Fact Liverpool, United Kingdom.

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Morehshin Allahyari (b. 1985; Tehran, Iran) is a Bay Area–based, Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to refigure myth and history. She is the recipient of the 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 and Sculptors Grant (2019); the Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019); and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award given by Foreign Policy magazine. Allahyari is an assistant professor of digital media art at Stanford University, California.

Her work has been part of exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world, including at the Venice Biennale Architettura; in New York at the New Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Queens Museum; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, Taipei, Taiwan.

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