And She Made the Moon a Light in Their Midst

       وَجَعَلَ الْقَمَرَ فِيهِنَّ نُورًا

و ماه را در میان آنها نوری قرار داد.

Bahareh Khoshooee and Naz Orakzay
curated by Maryam Ghoreishi

Opening Reception: Thursday, Oct 16th, 6–8pm


On view: Friday, October 17th, 2025 — Sunday, January, 9th, 2026
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 11am – 6pm

Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present And She Made the Moon a Light in Their Midst, a collaborative multimedia exhibition by Kabul-based artist Naz Orakzay, artist Bahareh Khoshooee and curator Maryam Ghoreishi. Narrating a dialogue of solidarity that unfolded over nine months, across geographic and circumstantial distances, the exhibition positions the Moon as a site where two epistemologies converge: a collective feminist relational imagination in contrast to a Western colonial techno-scientific perspective. 

For Orakzay, after being stripped of her public life following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, the Moon took on renewed significance as both a visible point of contact and a surrogate form of care for her: an interlocutor in the absence of community and connection. “To speak to the Moon”–often pathologized within Afghan and Iranian cultural contexts as irrational or “mad”– became reframed as a practice of resistance and the refusal of erasure.

The Moon then came to serve as a shared point of reference, a presence that alternated between their horizons. In presenting the Moon as both companion and a site of projected colonial impositions, the exhibition advances an inquiry into the politics of visibility, technology, and gender. The lunar surface as an analogue for women’s bodies and voices, subject to erasure, surveillance, and regulation through technological means: from facial recognition systems in Iran to the exclusion of women from public presence in Afghanistan.

The central collaborative piece engages the lunar terrain generated by NASA’s LCROSS mission in 2009, when a rocket named Centaur was deliberately crashed into the Moon’s surface in search of water. Such violent intervention signals an epistemic framework that renders the cosmos as resource, surface, and laboratory, subject to extraction and possession. It resonates with terrestrial violences—from the bombardment of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led war (2001); to the pulverization of the Zagros mountains in Iran through Operation Midnight Hammer, a U.S. military operation (2025), in the name of nuclear weapons control where geography itself became proxy for power. These gestures scarred landscapes and lives alike, producing displacement, loss, and dispossession. 

Against this extractive vision and the approaches of these regimes, the artists reorient the Moon toward intimacy and testimony, centering collective and care-based practices of world-building that foreground the moon as a site of solidarity that exceeds appropriation.

The exhibition’s curation and the creation of the works included evolved simultaneously, generated by the ongoing dialogue between Ghoreishi, Orakzay and Khoshooee, yet from the beginning, the guiding aim was to challenge the flat, passive image so often projected onto Afghan and Iranian women, to refuse the erasure of their strength and resistance by narratives of fragility, to protest the reproduction of the patronizing gaze cast upon these women and eventually to reveal the complexity, the layers, and the depth of these women’s lived realities. What began as a collaborative project gradually unfolded into something far deeper: a space for listening, questioning, reflection, doubt, trust, empathy, and care—and ultimately, creation of new bodies of work. 

This project would not have been possible without Leeza Ahmady, Director of Asia Contemporary Art Forum (ACAF), and her commitment to support Afghan artists through ACAF's Talking Peers program; Arts for Afghanistan. The project was further sustained by the support of Blockbusters Collective and by Pratt Institute’s space and production resources.

About the artists:

Bahareh Khoshooee is a multidisciplinary artist, feminist activist, educator, and the co-founder of two collectives –Blockbusters (an international group of New Media artists), and [Redacted] (a network of feminist artists, activists, and technologists). Born in Tehran, Iran, Khoshooee uses time-based strategies in presenting work that fuses 3D environments, video projection mapping, sculpture, performance, and sound. Her practice explores the complex dualities of technology: its oppressive role in surveilling, documenting, and criminalizing BIPOC bodies, and its radical potential for futurity and alternative solidarities. Her work unearths how technology mediates the intimate and collective experiences of grief, violence, and memory, reclaiming these spaces as arenas for liberation, and reimagined futures.
Khoshooee is the recipient of Eyebeam’s Democracy Machine Fellowship and a Skowhegan alumna. She has presented her solo installations at the Dorothy Center for The Arts, Baxter St CCNY, The Elizabeth Foundation for The Arts,The Orlando Museum of Art,and NADA MIAMI 2018 among others. Khoshooee has been included in various group exhibitions including the Honor Fraser Gallery, Latinx Project, Southern Exposure, Museum of Photography Stockholm, and the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Artnet News, The Metro, and The Creators Project. 
baharehkhoshooee.com

Naz Orakzay is a photographer, graphic designer and writer. She received her bachelor in Photography from Kabul University. After graduation, she started working as a lecturer at the Fine Arts Faculty. Currently, she teaches English Literature at Women Online University in Afghanistan.
IG: @naaz.orakzay

About the curator:

Maryam Ghoreishi is an independent artist, curator, and arts administrator based in Brooklyn. Most recently Ghoreishi curated In-between, at The Bridge and Tunnel Gallery, New York, 2023. Other curated shows include The Pleasure of Futile Cycles, by Yasi Alipour, at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, 2022, Out of Sight, Beyond Touch, at the Center for Book Arts, New York, 2021, Who Really Cares, Cathouse Proper, New York, 2019. She also co-curated Pop-up Exhibitions as part of FIELD MEETING Take 6: Thinking Collections, at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, 2019, and MAPPING OUT A FIELD, Zanbeel Art, Los Angeles, 2020. Her exhibitions were featured in Special Week of Shows-within-a-Show on Art at a Time Like This and Hyperallergic. Ghoreishi has been collaborating with Asia Contemporary Art Forum (ACAF), working with Afghan artists through ACAF’s Talking Peers program, Arts for Afghanistan since December 2023. She received her B.F.A and M.F.A in Iran and her M.A in Visual Arts Administration from New York University.
maryamghoreishi.com

Ackknowledgements
Penumbra’s Project Gallery is generously supported in part by the Joy of Giving Something.

About the Project Gallery
The 300 square-foot Project Gallery offers emerging and mid-career artists a place to present new work. The exhibitions are developed in conjunction with Penumbra's editorial or educational programming. 

Contact: Lisa di Donato | lisa@penumbrafoundation.org