Alina Nazmeeva's YUHA builds a world from oil and myth

Game engines were built to render worlds worth wanting; Alina Nazmeeva points them at the ones we have already mined. YUHA, the media artist's solo exhibition opening August 28 at MANA Contemporary in Chicago, builds "an evolving world shaped by research into mythology, extraction, technological transformation, and the landscapes of oil," as the reel announcing the show puts it—simulation-based installation gathering fragments of a worldbuilding project Nazmeeva has been developing across media for years. It runs through September 10 on the building's fourth floor, supported by the Monira Foundation.

Nazmeeva, born in Tatarstan and now an assistant professor of computation at the Illinois School of Architecture, treats digital tools as storytelling devices and "sites of critique": the installation Bug in My Software paired handwoven textile landscapes with AI-driven ecosystem simulations at Chicago Gamespace, and the XR essay Pre-Game, made with media theorist Yvette Granata, read football culture for what it does to bodies and gender. Granata returns for the opening-night panel at 6:15 pm, inside a Friday opening party that runs 6 to 9 pm.

Games have flirted with petroculture before, usually as a resource counter and occasionally as a target—a game about blowing up an oil pipeline once drew a government investigation, as we covered at the time. What YUHA proposes is quieter and stranger: the engine not as commentary bolted onto extraction but as a mythology machine for it, worldbuilding in which the world being built is the one oil already made.