Refigured

A portion of this artwork exists online on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art. 

View Laughing Snake on artport

Morehshin Allahyari’s installation 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 original myth appearing in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript Kitab al-Bulhan (Book of Wonders), the Laughing Snake took over a city, killing its people and animals. An old man finally destroyed the snake by holding up a mirror to her, which made her laugh so hard at her own reflection that she died. 

In her installation, Allahyari “re-figures” the snake—which had existed only as an image in books—as a 3D-printed sculpture, presenting it in a mirrored space along with a hyperlinked story. The labyrinthine narrative mixes personal and imagined stories to address topics such as 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 project She Who Sees the Unknown (2017–21), in which she researches dark goddesses and fiendish female figures of Middle Eastern origin to explore how symbolic meanings embedded in traditions and myths surface in contemporary forms of oppression.