Russian Artists' Paranoid Vision of an Islamist World

[Merlion]

This online news comes with a video of the exhibition. Click here (http://www.russiatoday.ru/entertainment/news/18753/video) for the link.

Islamists conquer the world: paranoid vision? (http://www.russiatoday.ru/entertainment/news/18753)

RussiaToday. Dec 20, 2007. A group of Russian artists is presenting conceptual projects that explore the tough topics of the contemporary world. The AES+F group take a trip to the future where the world has been invaded by an Islamic civilization.

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The installation called “Islamic Project” visualises the fears of Western society about Islam.

At first glance the cityscapes are familiar but on closer inspection they are different. The Statue of Liberty is wearing a hijab. Big Ben is crowned with an Islamic-style dome. ...

The exhibition is on show at Moscow’s Triumph gallery. It consists of selected works from the group, created over the past twenty years.

[fritchie]

"where the world has been invaded by an Islamic civilization" - Sounds like somebody is picking up on George W. Bush's early malapropism, "We'll start a Crusade to [remedy] the Iraq situation..

[Merlion]

This article gives more info on the artist group AES+F.

Aiming for Controversy (http://context.themoscowtimes.com/print.php?aid=181932)

Art pranksters AES+F target Princess Diana and Islam. reports.

Dec 21, 2007. Moscow Times.

The Princess Diana files have been opened and closed regularly in the last 10 years to give the public information on whether she was pregnant, engaged, in love or depressed at the time of her death.

All of this is cheerfully ignored by the art group AES+F, who have created disturbingly lifelike images of Diana sitting up after a car crash, posing cheerfully on a car seat with a black dress, pearls and a bloodied face. They are screened in a video set to Queen's song, "Who Wants to Live Forever?"

"Diana is a female Jesus Christ, isn't she?" said Lev Yevzovich, ....

Needless to say the Diana video, made in 2000 and titled "Who Wants to Live Forever?" has never been displayed in a British gallery. But it is now on view at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, along with other politically incorrect installations by AES+F. The exhibition is a major retrospective of the group's work, covering almost two decades.

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From the artists' "Last Riots" series

In 1989, AES went overseas to Boston for their first exhibition, titled "Apollo Inspiring Another Poet," after a collector encouraged and funded the trip.

"We were clueless then, completely out of our natural environment," Svyatsky said. "At the time, we made some money with lectures but put it into a bank account in Boston, which we could not access from New York."

"We had to live on $3 a day," Yevzovich said, ... It's so different now."

In this year alone, the group has been to Spain, Italy, Austria and the United States. Their "Last Riot" photographs, a series of images of teenagers engaged in non-aggressive combat, were part of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. ...

... in 1996 ... AES+F released a group of digitally enhanced photographs titled "Islamic Project," which put them on the map. They depicted famous tourist attractions with superimposed Islamic details such as a dome on top of the Guggenheim in New York and a crowd dressed in white robes walking around Big Ben. In one photograph, the Statue of Liberty had her face concealed with a white hijab.

"You always hear about globalization, about McDonalds penetrating Third World countries but this is a kind of reverse globalization. We got into a lot of trouble for it in the 1990s, but after September 11, 2001, the works were taken more seriously," said Yevzovich ...

"We weren't trying to say that Islam is bad or that America is bad. We were just trying to say that it's paranoia that causes the problems."

Yevzovich said the images are better known than the artists are. "They are on posters at protests, they are on the Internet. Most of the time, without our names." ...