My series Material Speculation: ISIS is a 3D modeling and 3D printing project focused on the reconstruction of 12 selected statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015 in a series of highly-publicized YouTube videos. The series goes beyond metaphoric gestures and digital and material forms of the artifacts by including a flash drive and a memory card inside the body of each 3D-printed object. Like time capsules, each object is sealed (though accessible) for future civilizations. The information in these flash drives includes images, maps, PDF files, and videos gathered on the artifacts and sites that were destroyed. Thus Material Speculation: ISIS creates a practical and political possibility for artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool for resistance and documentation.

Material Speculation inspects Petropolitical and poetic relationships between 3D Printing, Plastic, Oil, Technocapitalism and Jihad.

On February 26, 2016, I published one of my reconstructions from “Material Speculation: ISIS,” as well as a dossier of my research, as part of Rhizome‘s series The Download.[15] Through this commission, my object file for King Uthal was made openly available to anyone for 3D printing.

I am currently working on finding a platform/museum for the release and the preservation of all the digital files and models from this project. If you are interested a museum, in the Middle-East, please contact me for more information.

In 2016, I was the recipient of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinker award and the Digital Sculpture 2016 Award by The Institute of Digital Art for Material Speculation: ISIS. The series led to a great deal of press and reviews, and has been continuously on loan for exhibition since I completed it, to venues including the Biennale Architettura (Venice, 2016), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017), Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (Sydney, 2017), among others.

*Special thanks to Pamela Karimi, Christopher Jones, Negin Tabatabaei, Wathiq Al-Salihi, Lamia Al Gailani Werr for their help with research.

*Special Thanks to Shannon Walsh, Shane O’Shea, Sierra Dorschutz,Patrick Delory, Christian Pramuk, and Mariah Hettel for their help with 3D modeling.

Morehshin Allahyari (b. 1985) is an artist, organizer, and educator. Recognised as a leading global thinker by Foreign Policy magazine in 2016, Allahyari was born and raised in Iran before relocating to the United States in 2007. Her practice engages with political, social, and cultural contradictions, utilising technology as both a philosophical framework and a poetic medium to document contemporary struggles. She is the co-author of The 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016) with Daniel Rourke, and her critically acclaimed project Material Speculation: ISIS — which reconstructs ancient artefacts destroyed by ISIS — has been exhibited worldwide.

Allahyari’s work is held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collections, San Francisco, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and other major institutions. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies at prestigious institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Venice Biennale di Architettura, Venice, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, Montreal, the Queens Museum, Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston. She has been an artist-in-residence at BANFF Centre, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk Pier9, the Vilém Flusser Residency Program in Berlin, and Eyebeam in New York City. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Wired, NPR, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera.

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 & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019), and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Allahyari is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University.