Mosque Manifesto

Mosque Manifesto: Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence is a hybrid book/art object offering a repertoire of ways in which creative forms of Islamic representation may foster a better understanding between cultures and generate a critical response to nationalism, xenophobia, and religious fundamentalism. Narrated in the form of a manifesto, the book postulates a new theory of the mosque as an ephemeral space that “takes place” through the ritual performance of the congregation. The work deconstructs essentialist expressions of identity in architecture as manifested by the frequent use of domes and minarets as the formal confines of mosque design. My visual critique rests on my decade-long theoretical and historical investigations into mosque architecture. I developed a set of five generative design principles that redefine the mosque in conceptual terms, rather than based on stylistic features. These guidelines allow for a critical playfulness and diversity in representation, which I probe and demonstrate through various artworks published in the book. Mosque Manifesto circulates in public in libraries and bookstores. It is sold and distributed as a book, and it is also exhibited as an art object, often using wallpapers with the manifesto text and the associated manifesto colors. The display is arranged to allow for book reading in exhibitions. 

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Concept, design, and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija 

Research: Azra Akšamija (book text and projects); Foreword: Finbarr Barry Flood; Afterword: Nebahat Avcıoğlu 

Production: Floor Van de Velde (layout, graphic implementation); Publisher: Revolver Publishing Berlin, DE; Printing: Offset Istanbul, TR 

Sponsoring: MIT Department of Architecture, ACT Program, partial support by the Council for the Arts at MIT

Book / object 

Published by Revolver, Berlin, DE 

Materials: cardboard, Munken paper 130g, color print, open spine binding, wall text, wallpaper in 10 colors 

Dimensions: 440 p, ills colour & bw, 11 x 19 x 3 cm

Launguage: English; run 800 pieces 

Future Heritage Collection: Office

Future Heritage Collection-Office speculates on how to decolonize the history of national museums. The project was aimed at raising awareness of the acute crisis that is afflicting the country’s cultural institutions and relating it to an understanding about politics of cultural heritage more broadly. Future Heritage Collection-Office personalized the loss which happens when the cultural institutions of a city, region, or country like Bosnia-Herzegovina are no longer able to gather and protect cultural heritage systematically.

The premise of the project was to create a participatory atmosphere by asking citizens and visitors of Sarajevo to select artifacts that they personally consider to be an important part of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s cultural heritage. Sarajevo’s citizens were invited to become collectors of their own cultural heritage by bringing in contributions for the Future Heritage Collection. It was left up to the will of the participants to contribute either recognizable objects of art and culture, and/or objects of everyday life like household goods, furniture, items of clothing, handicraft, books, or poems. The collection event included a public discussion with invited artists and cultural workers from Sarajevo. In a separate venue, the JAVA Gallery in Sarajevo, I set up a temporary Future Heritage Collection-Office, where the collected objects were photographed, cataloged, and exhibited during the international theater festival MESS in Sarajevo. After the exhibition, the objects were returned to their owners.

The project builds on the concept of my previous Future Heritage Collection #1.

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Concept, design, and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Production: Lejla Hodžić (conceptual contributions, local curation), Rotor-Center for Contemporary Art Graz (conceptual contributions), JAVA Gallery Sarajevo (space), Sandro Drinovac (graphic design, posters), Dina Cerić, Semir M. Dedeić (FHC office staff), Esma Zlatar (translations)

Photographs: Velija Hasanbegović

Sponsoring: “Year of Commemoration 2014” by the Office of the Regional Government of Styria, Department Culture, Europe and International Affairs.

Participatory project series, posters, workshops

Commissioned by <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art Graz, AT

Materials: temporary office, participatory collection of objects, forms, tags, photographs, posters, website, postcards

Dimensions: variable

Wanderjahre #1

Wanderjahre #1 [Journeyman Years] speaks to cultural and political dimensions of labor migration, of which the post-war influx of Turkish migrants in Germany is a classic example. The hard hat references the heavy labor of the first generation of Turkish migrant workers, the Gastarbeiters (guest workers) who were invited to Germany during the economic boom in the 1960s and 1970s. These migrant workers brought cultural traditions with them, as indicated by the 16th century Iznik pottery decoration on the helmet. The hard hat is made out of porcelain to create a contrast between the toughness of a covering used in dangerous labor and the fragility of expatriates’ migratory experiences, especially given that many families chose not to return to Turkey. Today, these guest workers’ fundamental role in creating Germany’s economic miracle is forgotten by nativist protests over the construction of mosques and other markers of Turkish and/or Islamic identity. Controversies over the public visibility of the Turkish minority group in Germany—with echoes of the sinister history of marginal groups in the Nazi era—and increasing polarization over the presence of “Islam in the West,” speak to the old continent’s challenges in coming to terms with its own history of imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, and competing nationalisms. The aim of this project is to destabilize the misconstrued and essentialist perceptions of Gastarbeiters’ identity in Germany by linking it to contemporary global politics of migrant labor and exploitation, also in and through architecture.

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Concept, design, and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Production: Nurgün Yavuz (ceramic painting), Ayşegül Aras (assistant designer, ceramic painting), Selim Yazıcı (ceramic craftsmanship), Mahir M. Yavuz (communication), Nina Softić (project coordination).

Wearable device

Project commissioned by the festival New Hamburg by German Theater (DeutschesSchauSpielHaus), produced for the exhibition New Hamburg Gallery in Hamburg Veddel, curated by Adnan Softić

Materials: hard hat, 2 porcelain helmets, ceramic paint, glazing

Dimensions: 25 x 15 x 30 cm

Future Heritage Collection: Archeologist

The Future Heritage Collection [FHC] is a collection of stories produced through interviews with “experts” on varied subjects having to do with heritage, including Islamic manuscripts, Egyptian architecture, and the memory of the Holocaust. Interviewees are asked to propose an example of what they consider to be “future heritage.” FHC-Archaeologist takes a hybrid form of a traveler bag with a mailbox containing messages from the future. The box stores ten different types of postcards, each written from the perspective of a future archaeologist. In addition, the mailbox contains a small screen displaying a 10-min video that narrates the content of these postcards. Playing an “archeologist from the future” in ten different future scenarios, I ask the viewer to contemplate a world in which cultural heritage has become inaccessible or irrelevant for a specific reason. Thus, the viewers are at once fictively in dialogue with a time not yet come, but also speaking with the belief that audiences in the present time can and will connect with their narrative. The Future Heritage Collection is aimed to foster a discussion about the relationship between citizenship and access to—as well as ownership of—cultural heritage. The initial exchanges of stories is aimed to prompt the global public to contribute their own stories, act on a civic level, or even engage with governments on behalf of a common heritage.

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Concept and design: Azra Akšamija

Research: Sonja Srdanović (research, interview assistance); Dietmar Offenhuber (conceptual contributions); Sara Abosch, Zdenka Badovinac, Rick Halperin, Jeff Spurr, Mark Dike Delancey, Patrick Salland (interviewees)

Production: Azra Akšamija (text, postcard and icon design, mailbox), Evelyn Ting (graphic production), Ian Jakob Soroka (camera, photos), Matt Kushan (electronics)

Photographs: Azra Akšamija, Judith M. Daniels (Wolk Gallery installation photos), Ian Jakob Soroka

Installation, video

Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Materials: 1 video, textile and cardboard,postcards

Dimensions: video, single-channel, 9:46; mailbox, 18 x 50 x 25 cm; postcards, 10 x 15 cm

Also see: Akšamija, Azra. Museum Solidarity Lobby. Ljubljana: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

Lace Mashrabiya

Lace Mashrabiya is an instantly recognizable assemblage of woodwork and window associated with Islamic architecture. This project reinterprets the mashrabiya motif to create a multi-sided experience for the spectator. Looking from the outside of the building toward the inside—that is, toward Mecca—the viewer can see the inscription “Allah.” The inscription is designed as a three-dimensional puzzle of individual lace pieces based on Kufic calligraphy. From inside the building, the viewer can see cross stitch-like motifs referencing local Austrian cultural traditions. The choice of lace references the textile history of Vorarlberg and points at the historical intersection between local tradition and global cultural flows. This global aspect continues as new customers from Nigeria and other African countries bring new tastes to Vorarlberg’s textile industry. The project’s superposing of motifs deconstructs the notion of static cultural identities, rendering them visible as an interactive process of cultural exchange.

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Concept and design: Azra Akšamija

Production: Karina Lia Penedo Silvester (drawings), Claudine Pachnicke (project management), VAI team (installation)

Sponsoring: HKG-Embroideries HOFER GMBH, Lustenau, Austria (lace materials)

Photographs: Azra Akšamija, Markus Gohm, Darko Todorovic

Textile installation (2013)

Project commissioned by the Vorarlberg Architecture Institute (VAI) for the exhibition INTERIOR VIEW SOUTHEAST: Investigations of Islamic Spaces, curated by Azra Akšamija, with co-curators Margit Greinöcker and Tobias Hagleitner.

Materials: Lace, wood, fish wire

Dimensions: 750 x 250 x 60 cm

Museum Solidarity Day / CultureShutdown

On October 4, 2012, after 124 years of existence, Bosnia’s National Museum closed down due to a funding crisis. Six other state-level institutions, including the National Art Gallery and the National and University Library, were also about to become permanently inaccessible to the public, isolating and endangering invaluable heritage collections. Responding to this crisis, I co-initiated the platform CULTURESHUTDOWN in January 2012, as an international civic platform operating through a website connecting scholars, artists, and cultural workers worldwide. Today, CULTURESHUTDOWN has grown into a significant voice in the global discourse on cultural heritage, to which individuals contribute informally and on a voluntary basis. Beyond activism, the platform produces multi-disciplinary work that attempts to envision a better future for this war-torn society and to re-imagine, via a cultural dialogue, new modes of peaceful coexistence. Our Facebook site has around 850 active followers, but our activities have reached roughly 25,000 people. The media coverage of our press has received 8,447 media mentions, with more than 40,000 online “impressions.”

In February 2013, I conceived of the global Museum Solidarity Day, which designated March 4, 2013 as the date for collective action: I asked representatives of museums and galleries worldwide to express solidarity with the threatened Bosnian institutions by using yellow barricade tape that I would supply to cross out one work in their collection. With the help of my colleagues from CULTURESHUTDOWN, my public call went global, resulting in the participation of over 390 cultural institutions from over 40 countries on 5 continents. This action was supported by international organizations CIMAM and ICOM. In summer 2013, I produced large-scale banners with pictures documenting the acts of solidarity for the facades of the Bosnian threatened institutions. It is important to note that the cultural institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina are not only the guardians of unique historical and cultural treasures; they also testify to a long history of coexistence in the region. Bosnia’s national museum thus presents a vision of a joint Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to all ethnonational groups and their common history. Artifacts kept in these institutions are important pieces of world cultural heritage and preserving them, we argue, is a matter of global concern.

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Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Research: Azra Akšamija, Selma Gičević, Maximilian Hartmuth, Asja Mandić, Jasmin Mujanović, Susan Pearce, Andras Riedlmayer, James Thomas Snyder, Jeff Spurr, Mladen Vuković (Editorial Board of CULTURESHUTDOWN), Sonja Srdanović

Production: Editorial Board of CULTURESHUTDOWN, Sandro Drinovac (graphics, banner production), Dietmar Offenhuber, Sonja Srdanović, Jegan Vincent de Paul (logo), Ljerka Dublić, Margarethe Makovec, Eva Meran, Zdenka Badovinac

Participants: 390 museums and cultural institutions from 40 countries across the globe

Sponsoring: Azra Akšamija (private), with the partial support of the Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT

Special thanks: CIMAM, ICOM, ICOM Hrvatska, Association of Art Historians of Croatia, e-flux

Participatory project in public space, photography, censorship actions

Materials: Yellow barricade tape, website, photographs, censorship as participatory action, 60 large banners, 1,000 postcards

Dimensions: Photos: variable; Banners: 100 x 200 cm; Postcards: 10 x 15 cm

Also see: Akšamija, Azra. Museum Solidarity Lobby. Ljubljana: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

Museum Solidarity Lobby [MSL]

Museum Solidarity Lobby [MSL] is an interactive installation, framing a discursive space for thinking about the future of national museums in post-national societies. The project links the museum crisis in the Balkans to the closing of cultural institutions in other places across the world. I propose the notion of “lobbying” as an artistic strategy to reclaim the museum for its constituency, making it a site where we can begin to reclaim the lost notion of public virtue. MSL consists of physical installations, hosting activist interventions and reflections. The physical installation is a hybrid of a barricade and a display system that can be assembled in different places in site-specific ways. Exterior installations include barricade elements that obstruct access to the host institutions’ entrance while emitting sound. The interior installation simulates a museum lobby assembled out of recycled museum shipping crates. Each shipping box can be transformed into modular furniture. One module in this system is the Sound Chair, featuring interviews with various experts about the politics of cultural memory and the dynamics of heritage in different contexts. Another module features the work of CULTURESHUTDOWN, an independent civic platform employing creative means to respond to the museological and cultural crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Visitors are invited to become “lobbyists” by filling out Museum Solidarity Day protest postcards.

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Concept and design: Azra Akšamija

Research: Zdenka Badovinac, Janeil Engelstad, Dietmar Offenhuber, Sonja Srdanović (conceptual contributions)

Production: Zachary Herrmann, Brad Willis (shipping boxes), Matt Kushan (equipment), Luisel Zayas (drawings)

Photographs: Azra Akšamija, Judith M. Daniels (Wolk Gallery installation photos)

Installation

Commissioned by MAP/Dallas Holocaust Museum, Dallas, TX and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Materials: Four museum shipping crates, interviews/sound, textiles, mini players, headphones, postcards, postcard rack, barricade tape

Dimensions: postcard box, 65 x 65 x 160 cm; small box, 35 x 65 x 25 cm; two sound chairs, 85 x 90 x 85 cm; barricade, variable

Also see: Akšamija, Azra. Museum Solidarity Lobby. Ljubljana: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

Tempelmarke [Temple Tag]

Commissioned for the exhibition The Turks in Vienna at the Jewish Museum Vienna, the project Tempelmarke [Temple Tag] explores possibilities of activating history through the embodiment of memory. The exhibition explored the history of the Sephardic Jewish community of Vienna that officially existed under the protection of the Ottoman sultan. Its synagogue, designed in Moorish style and called Das Türkische Tempel [The Turkish Temple], was inaugurated in 1887 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. The project aims to remember this extraordinary synagogue through the use of small wearable objects called temple tags.

A temple tag is a hybrid of a prayer shawl (tallit) corner and a plastic admission tag that can be attached to clothes of museum visitors. The golden rectangular tag has a hole in its center, though which tzitzit threads (three white and one blue) are led. A simple geometrical pattern is printed on the visible surface of the tag, referencing Moorish/ Islamic geometry, Jewish symbolism, and a design element of the former Turkish Temple (i.e. patterns of the carpet). The tag is golden-metallic, reminiscent of the golden tiles that used to cover the interior dome of the synagogue. The tag occupies and transforms the visitor’s admission by combining it with the corner of a tallit, four of which can transform the visitors’ clothes into a Jewish prayer shawl. With this, the modular character of the work comes to the fore: while an individual tag stands for an admission mark of the museum, four temple tags can form the four corners of a tallit. Ten tallits worn by individuals form the basis for a minyan, representing an abstraction of a synagogue. Thus, the Tempelmarke marks the entrant as a bearer of a part of a Jewish prayer shawl and references the current existence of the synagogue as a ruin, existing only in pieces, in memory, dispersed as was the Turkish-Jewish community. In addition to the tag, the piece includes a video-text installation, which shows the process of knotting a Sephardic type of tzitzit, which informs the visitor about the Viennese synagogue’s history and part of the culture it housed.

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Concept, design, and production: Azra Akšamija and Dietmar Offenhuber

Photographs: Azra Akšamija

Wearable device

Co-authored with Dietmar Offenhuber

Project commissioned by the Jewish Museum of Vienna for the exhibition The Turks in Vienna, curated by Felicitas Heinman- Jelinek, Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz and Gerhard Milchram.

Materials: 10,000 plastic admission tags, 1 video

Dimensions: Tags, 3.8 x 7.4 cm each; Video: single-channel, 10 min.

Also see: Akšamija, Azra, and Dietmar Offenhuber. “Tempelmarke.” In Die Türken in Wien. Die Geschichte einer Jüdischen Gemeinde, edited by Felicitas Heinman-Jelinek, Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz and Gerhard Milchram, 194–195. Vienna: The Jewish Museum, 2010.

Skalamerija [Contraption]

Skalamerija follows up on my 2002 project Arizona Road. Skalamerija is a contraption aimed at de-formalizing the Arizona Market’s current highly regulated spatial order, which has led to its recession. Ever since its regulation in 2002, the trade and urban development of the Arizona Market in the Brčko district in the northeast of Bosnia- Herzegovina has been decreasing to a point where its extinction is foreseeable. While no sustainable development is planned at this point, the future of the Arizona Market and its eventual transformation into a place of both trade and living will depend on its becoming less oriented toward selling cheap imported goods and offer different, more valuable products at reasonable prices. Skalamerija capitalizes on locally available materials, resources, and skills in order to initiate production of home-made and locally specific food and handicraft products. The contraption thus provides infrastructure for cooking, barbequing, smoking meat, roasting lamb, sewing, ironing, and carpet weaving.

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Concept and design: Azra Akšamija

Research: Ibrahim Akšamija, Dietmar Offenhuber (research contributions)

Production: The Stroom, The Hague

Photographs: Azra Akšamija, Dubravka Sekulić

Installation, photographs

Project commissioned by Stroom for the group exhibition Soft City at Stroom Den Haag, NL

Materials: 1 sculpture, 24 photographs

Dimensions: 1 x 4 x 3 m

Also see: Akšamija, Azra. “Arizona Road.” In Peraica, Ana. Smuggling Anthologies Reader. MMSU (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka,), 2015.

Flocking Mosque

Inspired by the geometric motifs of Islamic art, the Flocking Mosque juxtaposes these patterns with the five daily prayers of quotidien Muslim life. One “flower-circle” of this mosque can accommodate a prayer of twelve worshippers, by providing clean surfaces for those body parts that touch the ground during the prayer ritual. Each flower-circle consists of twelve pairs of slippers, twelve pairs of hand pillows, twelve head pillows, and a center bag with twelve prayer beads. The use of these pillows as “mini-prayer-rugs” is meant to create a visual analogy to religious rules of behavior, which in turn mystically represent the Islamic doctrine of unity in multiplicity, the al-Tawhid.

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Concept and design: Azra Akšamija

Production: Azra Akšamija (prototypes), Ismeta Kratovac (prototype development), “Plasman” d.o.o. Sarajevo (sewing)

Photographs: Azra Akšamija

Textile Installation

Project commissioned by Manifesta 7, for the group exhibition manifeSTATION, curated by Andreas Spiegl and Christian Teckert.

Materials: Textile pillows, prayer beads, qibla compass

Also see: Azra Akšamija, Mosque Manifesto: Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2015.

Kunstmoschee [Art-Mosque]

The KUNSTMOSCHEE is an interactive installation that was temporarily located on the external grounds of the Secession at Vienna from July 20th through September 30th, 2007. The project explores the interrelationships between architectural, territorial, and visual manifestations of religion and pluralism in Western Europe. KUNSTMOSCHEE is an attempt to create a hybrid of the religious and the secular space. This architectonic rug-landscape consists of 120 individual modules that together create an ornamental pattern. While the rugs can be used for daily prayer, they also provide a platform for socializing and cultural events. KUNSTMOSCHEE events include lectures, discussions, a carpet-weaving workshop, and screenings of contemporary Iranian films, in order to question cultural biases and focus on cultural diversity through play and sensory engagement. KUNSTMOSCHEE becomes thus a space for gathering and communication between visitors with different cultural needs.

The rugs for this installation were created by supervised groups of over forty Viennese from various age groups who were invited to participate in carpet-weaving workshops, with a premium placed on their diverse professional, religious, or cultural backgrounds as well as personal interests. The individual rugs were distributed among their makers and the program participants at the closing ceremony of the exhibition, disseminating the project to a demographic sample of the Viennese.

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Concept, design, and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Research and development: Adelheid Pretterhofer (architecture), Christina Nägele (outreach)

Production: Adelheid Pretterhofer (architecture, production), Christina Nägele (project manager), 60 citizens of Vienna (participatory carpet creation)

Sponsoring: Secession, Vienna; Kodak Austria (material sponsoring); with a partial support by the Council for the Arts at MIT

Participatory project in public space, wooden carpets

Project commissioned by the Secession Vienna for the outdoor exhibition, curated by Barbara Holub and Anna Mayer.

Materials: 120 carpets made of wooden triangles, paint, used ski-poles, rubber ropes, cable binders, screenings, readings, panel discussion, social gatherings

Dimensions: 1 carpet: 80 x 120 x 1 cm; ski-poles: 120 cm

Also see: Azra Akšamija, Mosque Manifesto: Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2015.

Dirndlmoschee

Dirndlmoschee is the second project in wearable mosque series (see Nomadic Mosque project description below). The concept is based on assimilating cultural characteristics of a place into one’s own context. The Dirndl, a traditional Austrian dress, is still worn as everyday wear in such places as the little town of Strobl at Wolfgang Lake. The Dirndlmoschee can be transformed into an Islamic prayer environment that provides a prayer space for three people. The dirndl’s apron is made out of a water-resistant material that can be unfolded into three connected prayer rugs. In the mosque configuration, the traditional shoulder scarf opens up into a veil. The silk decoration at the scarf edge playfully references a person’s hair, which is actually hidden by the veil. The belt carries a compass with a carabiner attached, from which prayer beads on ropes are hanging. The prayer beads are decorated with Swiss knives, from which the crosses were not removed, but re-symbolized as a decoration. The project involved discussions in various public spaces, including a communication with local Turkish immigrants, who showed interest in the Dirndlmoschee as a product. The project video documents my Islamic prayer at a pre-existing landscape sculpture in the shape of concentric circles, which provides a reference to Mecca. This piece also references the famous unfolding renaissance Pacher Altar located in the neighboring town of St. Wolfgang.

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Concept and production: Azra Akšamija

Photographs: Rahkeen Gray

Spatial thanks to: Major of Strobl, Veronika and Peter Hitzl, participants and organizers of the symposium Ortung 2005

Wearable device, 12 photographs, video (2005)

Project commissioned by the Cultural Department of Salzburg Government within the International Artist Symposium ORTung 2005 in Wolfgangsee, AT, for the exhibition at the Gallery 5020 Salzburg.

Materials: Local dirndl-dress textiles, 3 carabiners, black rope, 3 Swiss mini-knives, prayer beads, headscarf, single-channel video

Dimensions: dress size, 38 (EU), video, 5 min

Also see: Azra Akšamija, Mosque Manifesto: Propositions for Spaces of Coexistence. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2015.