In Moon-faced (2022), Morehshin Allahyari reimagines Persian Qajar-era portraiture to restore the non-binary gender representations that were once a hallmark of the visual culture of the country, but were gradually erased through Westernisation, European realist painting, and the advent of photography. In ancient Persian literature, the term moon-faced described beauty in both men and women; today, in Iran, it refers exclusively to women. Working with a multimodal AI model trained on archival Qajar paintings (1786–1925) and prompted with carefully researched keywords, Allahyari generates new genderless portraits that seek to repair this loss. The resulting video portraits reanimate a queer, gender-fluid tradition obscured by history, accompanied by an original score by Mani Nilchiani.

Morehshin Allahyari (b. 1985) is an artist, organiser, and educator. Recognised as a leading global thinker by Foreign Policy magazine in 2016, Allahyari was born in Iran before relocating to the US 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 (2015—16) — which reconstructs ancient artefacts destroyed by ISIS — has been exhibited worldwide. Allahyari’s work is held in major collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, US, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US. She has exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, Montreal, Canada; and Jeu de Paume, Paris, France. She is the recipient of, among others, the Creative Capital Award (2025), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019) and The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019). Allahyari is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University.