The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark presents Jacolby Satterwhite: A Feeling of Healing from November 17, 2022 to January 31, 2023 and Morehshin Allahyari: Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind from October 28, 2022 to January 1, 2024.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde (founded in 1991) collects, studies, and shows ephemeral and time-based artworks. In 2021, the museum became an itinerant museum to better host these formats and engage new audiences. Morehshin Allahyari’s online exhibition and Jacolby Satterwhite’s exhibition at a closed-down nightclub are on display at the museum this winter.
Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind—a digital exhibition by Morehshin Allahyari
How can we help to shape the world we wish to see and live in? To download Morehshin Allahyari’s sculpture Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind, you must agree to the artist’s “terms and conditions” and respond how you will do tiny actions to influence the world in the broader picture. In this fashion, you summon Zoba’ah, an Islamic creature who always brings about rapid transformation.
Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian-born artist, has 3D modeled the sculpture Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s virtual collection based on pictures of the jinn Zoba’ah from the 14th and 16th centuries. A jinn is an intelligent spirit known as a shape-shifter created from smokeless fire who resides in a parallel world in pre-Islamic and Islamic theology. Zoba’ah, which translates as “whirlwind,” is one of the most powerful jinn and produces quick transformation when summoned. Allahyari believes that meaningful change is required in this time of struggles for justice, wars, and impending climate calamities. As a result, she introduces Zoba’ah into virtual space, which has served as a critical 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, global Black Lives Matter protests, and the Me Too movement.
A Feeling of Healing by Jacolby Satterwhite
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The artist Jacolby Satterwhite demonstrates how marginalized people can use dance and music as shields against society’s treatment through virtual reality, video installations, and neon works. Nightclubs are highlighted in several of the artist’s works as places where a different and freer life for Black and LGBT people flourished in the past. As a result, the exhibition A Feeling of Healing is being shown in an old closed-down nightclub in Roskilde as an opportunity to explore possible safer venues in the city.
In Satterwhite’s inventive works, we travel through computer-generated worlds and maritime coastal locations, drawing on sources as diverse as Nigerian mythology, video games, pop culture, and art history. The artist is recognized for constructing magical digital landscapes in which avatars frequently move to electronic beats, revealing modalities of existence as both Black and LGBT people in response to their surroundings. Similarly, his mother, Patricia Satterwhite, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, found comfort in the world of imagination, where she invented home objects in the aim of patenting her ideas through periods of misery and joblessness. As a general feature in his works, Satterwhite has transformed his mother’s drawings into 3D animations, 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.