In her practice, Allahyari highlights power dynamics within museum collections and archives using technology to expand the stories and histories told through these cultural artifacts and who gets to tell these stories. “Who gets to have ownership of certain data, or an archive, or a story?” the artist asks. In her project Material Speculation: ISIS (2015-2016), Allahyari used 3D modeling and printing to preserve 15 statues that were destroyed by ISIS, each replica housing a flash drive with images, maps, videos, and texts that contextualize the artifacts. This act of digital preservation offers a new model for how artifacts might be saved for future generations, alongside a more holistic picture of their history and context. In her 2024 film and installation, Speculations on Capture, the artist creates a speculative history for Iranian and Pakistani astronomical instruments held in the archives of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Merging fact and fiction, Speculations on Capture imagines how the loss of these artifacts has impacted the cultures and peoples to whom they belong and proposes alternative histories and futures for these objects. Reconstructing lost artifacts and histories, Allahyari highlights the problems of archives and collections while offering alternatives to these systems. 

Often in her work, the artist calls attention to the power that storytelling has to shape our worldview, whether those stories are historical narratives, myths, or folktales. In the series of works titled She Who Sees The Unknown (2017–2020), the artist examines monstrous figures from Islamic cultures, reimagining them through queer and feminist retellings. In one such work, The Laughing Snake (2018-19), Allahyari reinterprets the eponymous myth in which a giant snake with the head of a woman destroys a city and its lands until she is shown her own reflection and laughs herself to death upon seeing her own image. Using 3D-printed sculpture, a mirrored room, and interactive hypertext narrative, the artist reclaims the figure of the Laughing Snake, reinterpreting her laughter as directed at the reflection of the world around her and reframing her death as a reclamation of agency. “I think that’s why I like speculation. There is a story there that has not been told, and this is my version of imagining it,” says Allahyari. Throughout her practice, the artist expands on historical narratives and cultural myths to reveal and destabilize power dynamics, retrieve lost and forgotten histories, and offer more complex visions of the past and the future.