Morehshin Allahyari and Alireza Doostdar in Conversation

Morehshin Allahyari and Alireza Doostdar are sitting down for a conversation at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Thursday, October 29, at 4 PM. It's part of the Arts, Technology and Social Change series, a micro-residency program sponsored by the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme and put together by Ohio State's Department of History of Art, the Department of Art, the Wexner Center, and the Translational Data Analytics Institute.

The talk brings together two very different ways of looking at the same things. Allahyari is an artist; Doostdar is an anthropologist. They'll be talking about how emerging technologies and AI are changing historical memory and cultural knowledge, and why mythology and archives are feeling relevant again. It's a conversation that pulls from both their worlds—Allahyari's interdisciplinary art practice and Doostdar's research on science, religion, and modernity.

Allahyari is an Iranian Kurdish artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she's also an assistant professor of digital media art at Stanford. Her work moves across 3D simulation, video, code, sculpture, and digital fabrication, and she uses those tools to challenge the legacies of Western technological colonialism in the MENA region. She's shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, the Whitney, the Pompidou Centre, MoMA, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Doostdar's side of the table comes from anthropology, with a focus on science, religion, and modernity. Together, they'll be working through how the tools we use to record and remember the past are shifting under our feet. There's a Q&A after the talk, so you'll have a chance to ask your own questions. It's free for all audiences with a ticket, and admission is first come, first served, in the Film/Video Theater at the Wexner Center.