Unpacking the ArteArchive Program

Featuring work by: Anahid Yahjian, Emily Mkrtichian, Kamee Abrahamian, Lee Williams Boudakian, Nouf Aljowaysir, Morehshin Allahyari, Yazan Khalili, and Sadia Quddus

Curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Screening Online: October 21-31, 2025 
RSVP: artearchive.org 
Available worldwide
FREE / $5 suggested donation

Screening In-person: October 21, 2025, 7pm
Address: e-flux, 172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Tickets: sliding scale $7-10
Get tickets here

Film Program: Transmission by Kamee Abrahamian, Ana Min Wein? by Nouf Aljowaysir, Speculations on Capture by Morehshin Allahyari, Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind by Yazan Khalili, Istikhara Dream Cycle by Sadia Quddus.

Followed by a discussion between artist Nouf Aljowaysir and curator Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

ANCESTRAL COMPUTATION assembles works that counter the epistemes of Western technoscience, from across the SWANA region and its diasporic time-spaces. These works call forth ancestral intelligences, inheriting forms of worldmaking surfaced from the lacunae of omissive datasets and archives of dispossession. They traverse algorithmic dream divination; develop tools for upending classificatory protocols; evade technologies of capture; and conjure precolonial deities through radio transmissions. They invoke alternate temporalities, rejecting the consignment of non-Western technologies to the dustbins of media history.   

ANCESTRAL COMPUTATION is curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and is co-presented by ArteEast and e-flux. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. The program will be presented in-person at e-flux, on October 21st. The screening will be followed by a discussion between artist Nouf Aljowaysir and the curator. The full ANCESTRAL INTELLIGENCES program will be available online on artearchive.org from October 21 – 31, 2025. This program expands on the screening Ancestral Intelligences, hosted at Cambridge University by Cambridge Film & Screen and Cambridge Visual Culture. Ancestral Intelligences was curated by Mashinka Hakopian in conversation with Kareem Estefan.

Film Program:

Anahid Yahjian, Emily Mkrtichian, Kamee Abrahamian, Lee Williams Boudakian, Transmission, Canada and United States, 2018, 13 mins.
English with English subtitles

Synopsis: K and L are cultural conservationists working in a not-so-distant future to preserve the artifacts and histories that are being systematically destroyed by a totalitarian government. When they are in a deadly car accident, time splinters into parallel realities, separating them. Each enters a reality where one dies while the other lives, and they embark on a search between worlds to find each other again.

Nouf Aljowaysir, Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?), United States, 2022, 12 mins and 29 secs.
English and Arabic with English subtitles

Synopsis: Where Am I From? (Ana Min Wein?) is a short film and visual diary that explores the director’s identity using two different perspectives, hers and that of an AI “narrator.” After immigrating to the United States from Saudi Arabia at a young age, Nouf examines her identity by tracing the memories of her childhood and family. As the AI character sustains her journey, he reveals stereotypes and biases derived from his training and algorithmic composition. Contrasting oral storytelling with artificial intelligence, Where Am I From? exposes the reduction of Nouf’s identity and the eradication of the collective memory of his ancestors.

Morehshin Allahyari, Speculations on Capture, United Kingdom, 2024, 40 mins.
English with English subtitles

Synopsis: The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London has over 19,000 objects from the Islamic world (one of the largest collections of Islamic art in the world), ranging from the 7th century to the early 20th century. Allahyari’s poetic film explores the stories of astronomical instruments made in Iran and Pakistan and now held at the V&A. Dating from the 1200s to the 1700s, each object was modeled in 3D specifically for this project and features in the film alongside archival documents and related photographs. The museum’s archives, used in the film as a case study, capture only fragments of these objects’ histories. Documents record their arrival between about 1865 and 1930, but there is little sense of how their displacement impacted their places of origin and the people living there. Their journeys reflect imperial histories that have shaped the Western museum’s collections. Born and raised in Tehran, Allahyari expands on these partially told tales. She deliberately combines fact and fiction to speculate on the encounters that have been lost, the knowledge that has been diverted and the cultural histories rendered inaccessible. Allahyari aims to disrupt the museum environment, reframing its imperial power dynamic and realigning objects with their own histories, cultures and people. She lifts fragmented stories beyond the confines of the museum, imagining how the past could have been different and the possibilities the future may hold.

Yazan Khalili, Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind, Palestine, 2016, 7 mins and 30 seconds.
Silent

Synopsis: In the video Hiding our Faces like the Dancing Wind, Khalili presents a video that is a screen seen through a number of other screens. This interplay exposes structures, operations and algorithms that become the image itself. Speaking about his work Khalili talks about how in today’s world we see images through the screen to the extent that each image takes on a life of its own – it can be shared, edited, stored etc – all within a screen. As a result of this he has started to question the way in which images are produced, viewed and distributed. The video also questions the use of technology and its tendency to typecast. In the video he features a woman’s face captured by a camera screen, which appears to confuse the facial recognition system so that a sequence of ethnographic masks interrupts the frame. This work recalls colonial mechanisms of racial classifications and the construction of historical narratives.

Sadia Quddus, Istikhara Dream Cycle, 2025, 10 mins.
English with English subtitles.

Synopsis: Istikhara Dream Cycle is an endless conversation held between two entities, the Dreamer and the Interpreter of Dreams. Their discourse is formed through a generative language model trained on the English translation of Ibn Sirin’s 7th century oneiric manual, The Interpretation of Dreams. Through a series of questions and answers, the Dreamer poses increasingly challenging and self-implicating questions, seeking guidance to navigate the moral and spiritual complexities of modern life. The Dreamer’s constant desire for truth pushes the conceptual and formal boundaries of Istikhara dream divination beyond its traditional limits. The dialogue unfolds as the Dreamer passes through a series of vibrant reveries developed using a separate generative interpretation of the artist’s own work. The answer to each question manifests in two forms. While the diviner speaks the reading, it also reveals itself visually in an ideogrammatic form, a totemic symbol that blends Arabic, Bangla, and Latin letterforms.

Biographies:

Kamee Abrahamian holds a BFA/BA in film and political science (Concordia University), an MA in expressive art therapy (European Graduate Institute), and an MA/PhD in Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco Psychologies (Pacifica Graduate Institute). Their doctoral research explored legacies of relational ontologies and ethics of care by diasporic-SWANA women and queers. Kamee has created, produced, toured, and presented a vast body of work including narrative & documentary film, visual & media art, staged & immersive performances, exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, workshops, festivals, advocacy campaigns, and podcasts. Their projects have been supported by local and national funding bodies across Canada, USA and Armenia. They’re a Pushcart nominated writer, a Lambda-awarded playwright, and an alumni resident at VONA, Banff Center for Arts, and DocX (Duke University). The documentaries they’ve worked on with Oolik Productions have been supported by Sundance, Visions du Réel, HotDocs, and Catapult. Their short film Transmission (2019) – the first known Armenian science fiction film – premiered at BFI FLARE, and their documentary Symptom (2024) premiered at the SF Doc Fest. Most recently, received the 2025 Creative Capital Award, published a children’s book (The Brighter I Shine) and organized a multi-day arts program for a gathering of 4000 global-south feminist activists in Bangkok (AWID Forum 2024). For the screen, they are currently developing a short film anthology (Portals), a limited series (Ensouled) and a feature film (We Are Our Mountains). They are also touring a mixed-media monument project for Western Armenians (Flesh, Immemorial) and writing a graphic novel based on their experiences as a new, queer, neuro-spicy mother called Queer Motherhood is Fucking Magic.

Nouf Aljowaysir is a new media artist and product designer at Medium based in Brooklyn. She splits her time between the art and tech world to study how technologies are designed and their consequential impacts on society and culture. Her artistic research and work specifically focuses on our changing relationship with algorithms. She poses intimate questions to tools of “intelligence”, using the exchange to reflect not only on herself but also on how these systems shape our ways of seeing and thinking. Nouf has been awarded residencies at ThoughtWorks Arts and Somerset House. Her  work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, M+ Museum, CPH:DOX, and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others.

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره‌شین اللهیاری‎), is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist, using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. 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.

Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Khalili’s photography is detailed, reflective and full of intent. Using photography and the written word, Khalili unpacks historically constructed landscapes. Borrowing from cinematic language, images become frames where the spectator embodies the progression of time and narratives. He weaves together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. In particular, he focuses on the effect of geographical distance on our rendering of territory, and its ability to heighten or arrest our political and sentimental attachments. Born 1981. Works in and out of Palestine, currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he is a PhD candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. He is an architect, visual artist, and cultural producer. His works have been exhibited in several major exhibitions, including among others: Documenta fifteen 2022, KW, Berlin 2020, MoCA Toronto 2020, New Photography, MoMA 2018, Jerusalem Lives, Palestinian Museum, 2017, Post-Peace, Kunstverein Stuttgart 2017, Shanghai Biennial 2016, Sharjah Biennial 2013. In 2020 he co-founded Radio Alhara, and in 2019 he co-founded The Question of Funding collective.

Sadia Quddus is a media artist and designer based in Los Angeles, California. Her work investigates entangled relationships between the corporeal, virtual, and territorial body through the lens of Islamic belief systems and the infrastructure of Empire. Sadia’s practice subverts hierarchies of visibility through the manipulation of image surfaces and physical space. She enmeshes body, landscape, technology, and ritual in physical and digital objects. Her current research explores technologies of surveillance and data-capture, terrestrial politics, military ontologies, and cyber-mysticism, all in the conceptual framework of the “image body.” Sadia holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and is currently pursuing her MFA in Media Art at UCLA Design | Media Arts (DMA). She is a 2025 Supercollider SciArt Ambassador.