Artists Shirin Fahimi and Jawa El Khash turn to the digital to reimagine what history has lost

Artist Shirin Fahimi was not raised in a particularly religious family, but says her grandmother had prophetic dreams. 

Growing up in Iran, she noticed that many books in her school library were about prophets, but none spoke of women as prophets. In an immersive video installation currently on view at Toronto's Trinity Square Video, the artist asks the question that's long perplexed her: Where are all the female prophets?

The gallery floor at TSV has been transformed into a reflective, pool-like surface for a large screen encircled by mounds of sand, expanding the environment of Fahimi's alluring installation. On either side of the room stand podiums where holograms rest atop model columns in the style of a mini courtyard, mirroring the colonnades from artist Jawa El Khash's interactive video work stationed nearby. The scene is captivating — a self-enclosed world where past and future collide.

These two Toronto-based artists featured in the exhibition Spectral Futures invoke the spiritual, architectural and ecological pasts from their home countries — Fahimi's Iran and El Khash's Syria. Through their separate digital media art practices, they show the historical groundwork necessary for building a future, making room for narratives that have been lost, omitted or removed from the dominant record. 

Inspired by seventh-century Islamic divination practices, viewers of Fahimi's Umm al Raml's Sand Narratives sit on the floor around a circular table with a Farsi diagram, devised by the artist from astrology charts and divination books. "Umm al Raml" translates to "mother of sand" and refers to the divination method of geomancy, where one interprets markings in the earth or formations of rocks. 

Her interests in divination and the metaphysical come from the desire to perceive things that are invisible, but which could be made visible, she says. In trying to imagine something in the past that has not been recorded or was perhaps omitted altogether — namely, a female prophet — divination becomes a method for envisioning this possibility. 

Within Umm al Raml's 3D-rendered desert, a digitally modelled Fahimi moves between four divination houses. At every stop, a floating portal shows a different masked woman, each one speculating on the role of women mystics within Islamic orthodox theology. The four women — all 40-to-60-year-old Iranians from Toronto — were selected to each represent one divination method: earth, air, fire and water. Fahimi undertook this process with them, asking questions and showing them figures drawn from various divination methods, which they would then close their eyes and interpret. 

In a poetic and revelatory process, the women receive messages and describe images. They become mediators between two realms, unlocking the doors of prophecy by channeling an ancient tradition. 

As a divination practitioner herself, Fahimi has spent much of her lifetime trying to uncover the answer to why female prophets have been left out of the record. She questions how some of these divination books have been written and translated.

"If there is no singular origin story," she says, "I can create my own." 

Similarly constructing a past to speculate on the future, El Khash's The Upper Side of the Sky takes the ruined city of Palmyra in Syria as a case study for imagined preservation. A Roman colony that was destroyed by emperor Aurelian, evacuated by the French mandate for archaeological excavation in 1932 and destroyed again by ISIS in 2015, it is a city with a long history of plunder. In her interactive, animated environment, El Khash salvages monuments and botanicals lost to centuries of war, exploring possibilities for restoration and renewal. 

Amidst renderings of landmarks like the Temple of Bel, the Roman Theatre and the Monumental Arch of Palmyra, visitors can use a keyboard to navigate a courtyard, a chrysalis chamber and a greenhouse. Inside the greenhouse are flora representing some of Syria's pre-civil war exports: date palms, cotton, apples and Aleppo pepper powder. The seed banks in Aleppo have since been abandoned as a result of the war, endangering the continued survival of over 150,000 plant species from the Fertile Crescent. 

Building on her grandfather's work as a plant pathologist and director of the Arab Center for the Study of Arid Zones and Dry Lands in Damascus, El Khash uses his archives for visual reference. In the archways of the chrysalis chamber hang botanical drawings, while the greenhouse exterior is marked with floral tilework traditional to Damascus. 

Accompanying the digital component are two holographic works, A Butterfly Feeding and A Palmyrene Coin, which El Khash refers to as "time capsules." The first portrays a butterfly feeding on fruit within the courtyard. "In Islamic architecture, the courtyard is the pulsating heart of an architectural house," she notes. The latter shows the legend of third-century queen Zenobia, who is seldom represented in art history. 

Fusing the relationship between architecture and environment, El Khash's works use rich blue tones that invoke a romantic nighttime scene as much as the grief of loss. As a simultaneous encounter with memory and speculation, her reconstructive ethos touches on a deep understanding of past events and ecosystems as a means of imagining what can be done to rebuild. 

Fahimi and El Khash both understand that each era can and should be made anew. They know, too, that each generation has its own power to do so, and that this transformation is material as much as it is spiritual. Engaging with the speculative power of digital media art, these artists stretch the limits of the possible within the contexts of ancient history and tradition. And, by breathing life into the past, what emerges are the building blocks for new worlds. 

The exhibition Spectral Futures runs through March 30 at Trinity Square Video in Toronto.