In 1996, at the outset of war in Chechnya, the Russia-based artist group AES (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky) initiated the Islamic Project, a series of works spanning 1996-2003 that not only catapulted the collective to prominence but created controversy, particularly after 9/11. In the first stage, Witnesses of the Future (1996) images of famous western landmarks and tourist destinations were digitally altered to look as if taken over by a radical form of Islamic culture. In 1997, AES launched Travel Agency to the Future: Islamic Project, an installation/performance in which souvenir items, such as posters, postcards, mugs, carpets, T-shirts, were sold with the Witnesses of the Future images printed on them, and where visitors could plan a fictional holiday in the future world. When extremists hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the project took on a new meaning. As the artists have written,
When horrible terror broke out in America, our grotesque artistic phantasm of 1996 seemed real and … we could feel as artists that [we] became prophets. But now all of us understand that revenge for the events in America would not be the last link in the chain, but the start of the 21st century history, when mankind has to solve the problems of coexistence in global world of poor and rich, religious and consumer societies. The project is neither anti-Islamic nor anti-Western, but tries to function as a psychoanalytical therapy in which phobias from both Western and Eastern society are uncovered and worked through. In … the Islamic Project we tried to reveal the contradictable ethics and aesthetics of our times. We believe that contemporary art does not solve the problems, but it can raise the major questions.[1]
The work has been manifested in two forms: 1) the AES Travel Agency to the Future, first shown in Moscow in 1996; and 2) an installation entitled Oasis (2000-3), which emulates Bedouin tent made from “traditional handmade carpets stitched from cotton fabric with our Islamic images printed on silk (carpets produced in Egypt). It is a place for meditation and dreaming on sofas with water pipes, Arabic music etc.”[2] The project has been shown in most European countries, the United States, and South Korea, and has received attention in major newspapers and journals around the world.
As the artists state,
The work was a commentary on Western Islamophobia and in particular referenced Samuel Huntington’s popular political paradigm of the “Clash of Civilisations”, 1993, in which the author argues that future front lines in history would be between cultures, not states – in particular between the West and cultures following Islam. The digitally altered images became a representation of the absurdity of theories like those set forth by “The Clash of Civilisations”, in particular the perceived dichotomy between the West and Islam (between the image of modernity, innovation and science opposed to tradition, aggression and backwardness).[3]
References
Artlyst, “AES+F Digital Project Challenges Perceptions Of Islam In Western Society”
[1] https://aesf.art/projects/islamic_project/
[2] https://aesf.art/projects/islamic_project/
[3] https://aesf.art/projects/islamic_project/