Nomadic Mosque

Nomadic Mosque explores various ways of negotiating spatial relationships between Islamic traditions and modernity in the United States and Western Europe by creating wearable mosques, clothing that can be transformed into prayer rugs. While respecting religious restrictions, Nomadic Mosque aims to redefine traditional forms and functions of mosques in the contemporary context. The intention is to represent identity and religion as a dynamic process that allows change in time and place. The project reinterprets the concept of the mosque based on the Prophet Mohammed’s phrase, world as a mosque, as wearable architecture. The Nomadic Mosque is a minimal-volume mosque, whose design is based on individual needs and experiences. It is a device to transform any secular space into a prayer space. Not only does the wearable mosque accommodate the liturgical necessities, but also acts as a prosthetic device for the worshipper communicating his or her prayers, problems, needs, and desires. The project combines a prototype design for a wearable mosque and a five-minute video that shows ritual prayer in various public spaces. Allowing for the new young Islamic community to speak out, Nomadic Mosque operates as a provocative statement to claim a right to visibility and speak out against marginalization.

---

Concept and production: Azra Akšamija

Research and development: Andreas Mayer, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Interrogative Design Workshop (conceptual contributions)

Video: Azra Akšamija (script, editing); Andreas Mayer (camera), anonymous participant at Revere Beach (prayer)

Photographs: Jörg Mohr (photographer); Martin Zoigner, Andreas Mayer, Reno Rieger (light); Dopplinger Light & Grip Vienna (studio and equipment)

Special thanks: Rahkeen Gray, MIT Muslim Students Association

Wearable device, 12 photographs, video (2005)

Project produced as part of the Interrogative Design Workshop at MIT; Project advisor: Krzysztof Wodiczko

Materials: Textiles, qibla compass, prayer beads, zippers, single-channel video.

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

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

Bread&Games, Plant&Play

Bread and Games, Plant and Play investigates the interaction of formal and informal systems in the process of urban revitalization. It is meant to provoke a set of questions to which the community would find their own answers and solutions. Plastic boxes in the Biennial logo colors were displayed as units to facilitate the exchange of goods, ideas, or skills; or they could serve as event infrastructure. In the initiating event, people from the local community were invited to take away boxes of soil and seeds and encouraged to return with their “grown-up” vegetables to the final cooking event. New boxes were supplied every week to the community park. While the planners did harbor some scenarios, the project was open to take any number of unexpected directions. The community soon began to collect boxes, making them into a kind of new currency in the area.

The local project team tried to bring this taking of the boxes under control. The shift from artist-observer to a controller role culminated in a dangerous power conflict with the local hooligans, forcing the project manager to involve the police. As all the boxes were taken, the social sculpture evolved in the dematerialization of the physical installation and its re-materialization through use and misuse. The empty box was a metaphor for the lack of ideas and tools for addressing community problems. It became a tracking device for the community’s passiveness and the inability of social institutions to break out of their established methodologies. The uncertainty of the final goal and the lack of the “final sculpture” interjected an aesthetically and sociologically interesting instability into the established system of relationships between artists and parts of the community. Yet, the creative appropriation of the hooligans as project photographers not only reversed assumed hierarchies, but transformed the notion of control into collaboration, creating a fragile yet real mutual respect.

---

Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Research and development: Andreas Mayer, Brian Melcher (conceptual contributions)

Production: Rebecca Reid, Sue Wrigley (project management and implementation); Munira, Ibrahim, and Enes Akšamija, Marc Daniels, Adrian Devers, Paul Domela, Sharon Paulger, Rebecca Reid, Cath Stevenson, Sue Wrigley (event production); Julie Anderson (sociologist evaluation); Really Useful Products Ltd (boxes production); Lady Green Nursery (plants and compost)

Photographs: Jessie Blindell

Special thanks: David Rhöse, Nadja Akšamija

Participatory project in public space and at the Tate Gallery Liverpool

Project commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial 2004 for the International Exhibition, curated by Paul Domela.

Materials: 1000 plastic boxes, 500 bags of soil, 100 vegetable seeds, international recipes

Dimensions: 30 x 50 x 45 cm

Generic Mosque

Generic Mosque proposes a conceptual architectural grammar that can be adapted and changed for mosque designs, defining the mosque as a performative space, and moving away from stylistic parameters. While reinterpreting historical elements of a mosque, this project suggests ways to synthesize learning and interacting between Islamic and non-Islamic contexts, subcultures, and religious practices. The modular structure can aggregate into a hypostylistic mosque. The honeycomb-like floor plan can be infinitely expanded and adapted to any site. The overall system is derived from an Islamic geometric pattern. The roof, façade, and walls consist of hexagonal elements in three different sizes, depending on the spatial use. Each roof hexagon is supported by three steel columns forming an “umbrella.” The conical formation of the columns directed towards Mecca emphasizes the prayer direction. In this way, the entire space takes on the function of the mihrab. In profile, the columns shape the crystal-like formation of differently-sized patterns nested in each other. The roof-hexagons carry differently-colored light and shading elements, which can project patterns onto the floor. Prayer rugs are hung on the façade, which allows for varied use of the interior. By using the prayer rugs, worshippers transform the façade, thus creating different levels of transparency. The ritual act of placing the rug on the floor would stimulate sensors in the roof and affect its color constellation. In this way, the entire roof and façade becomes a reinterpretation of a minaret, here literally shaped as the “bundle of light.” The different visual barriers between male and female prayer spaces would be created through textiles. This allows for fluid spatial arrangements (be it parallel, behind one another, or even zigzag) depending on the community size and its gender arrangements.

---

Concept and design: Azra Akšamija

Materials: 40 hexagonal posters on wooden frames, wire models

Dimensions: hexagons with 60 cm diameter; models variable

Production: David Rhöse (graphics, frames); Jason Anderson, William Hartzog, Mathew Haseltine, Ash Lettow, John Morrison, Beth Stryker, Mersiha Veledar, Michael Young, Leslie Witt (models, design, and conceptual contributions); Brian Melcher (video)

40 Drawings and models

Thesis project for M. Arch degree at SOA Princeton University; Advisors: Jesse Reiser, Thomas Leisten

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

Kupujmo Svoje! [Buy Local!]

This project probes the impromptu survival economy of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The end of the communist era opened up a new and unexplored market for Western products. To question the way international capital in the post-Communist era operated as a mechanism of political and economic control, the I instigated an act of culture jamming by using the design of shopping bags, alluding to the campaign Let us buy ours! Let us buy Bosnian products! that was started by several Bosnian firms in order to boost the country’s local economic potential. The installation shows a modified Chinese and a Burberry checkered shopping bag and

---

Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Production: Azra Akšamija (graphics, bags, video), David Rhöse (graphics)

Special thanks: David Rhöse, Michael Stoiser

Video installation

Project commissioned by the Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig for the Berlin Art Fair group show (2003), curated by Ilina Koralova and Barbara Steiner.

Materials: 2 bags made of printed Tyvek, 2 monitors, 2 media players, 2 videos

Dimensions: bags, 20 x 60 x 70 cm; videos, single-channel, 3 min each

The Fallen Angel

Fallen Angel explores the emergence of the war souvenirs produced by Bosnian craftspeople who transform artillery shells into vases. Unexpectedly, many people have found that these vases help them deal with their own personal war experiences, perhaps by transforming the reminders of death and destruction into harmless everyday objects. By creating objects that materially consume memory, they have contributed to the development of war tourism, a controversial but powerful force in the Bosnian economy today. I relate these souvenirs to the destroyed building of the newspaper Oslobođenje (Freedom), also known as the “Fallen Angel”–one example of the ongoing urbicide in Sarajevo.

This project poses questions about what constitutes a monument. The Bosnian war souvenirs used the language of war, but overwrite it with an object of domestic peace. Yet, these monuments for mass consumption still embody human emotions and personal memories of war. This monument is not a permanent edifice. Similarly, by merging patterns of national identity with patterns of destruction, derived from a photograph of the ruin of Oslobođenje, my project appropriated the design and production of new Bosnian war souvenirs in wood, metal, and textile. I designed abstract patterns based on the ruin. I gave these patterns to the craftspeople in Sarajevo to produce new war souvenirs used for the traditional coffee drinking ritual: Ottoman furniture, dishes, and stitched tablecloths. In addition, I designed business cards aimed to support the hand craftspeople financially, helping preserve the traditional craft, which remains an important but disappearing component of the Bosnian cultural heritage.

---

Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Production: David Rh.se (graphics), Drina Karahasanović (project management), Sakib Bašcauševic (metal souvenirs), Bedra

Izetbegovic (textile souvenirs), Sejo Sejfudin Vila (wood souvenirs)

Special thanks: Nadja Akšamija, David Rhoese

Also see: Akšamija, Azra, “The Fallen Angel: The building of ‘Oslobođenje’ in the context of post-war reconstruction of Bosnia

and Herzegovina,” Arterlier: Contemporary Art Magazine, no. 8 (2003): 146–154.

Photograph, wall text, 7 designed souvenirs

Project commissioned by the Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig for the group exhibition Introducing Sites / Cultural Territories (2003), curated by Ilina Koralova.

Materials: photograph on wallpaper, vinyl cut, patterns design, 2 wooden tables and 1 tablet, metal and ceramic coffee set,

embroidered napkins

Dimensions: Wallpaper: variable; wooden tables: 30 x 30 x 50 cm; tablet: 20 x 40 x 2 cm; coffee set 20 x 20 x 5 cm

Arizona Road

The project examines the new urban phenomena of the largest black market in the Balkans, the Arizona Market located near the city of Brčko. Arizona Road was the name given by the American military to the north-south highway in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The market provides a unique opportunity to observe a birth of a city and actively shape it from an urbanistic and architectural standpoint. The informal market system invites conflicts with the formal system, while being parasitic upon the latter’s inefficiencies. As the formal market begins to fail or becomes too inefficient, the informal system becomes more powerful. In an urban context, this proposition implies a new kind of thinking about an architect’s impact on the evolution of the city. It suggests that directed assimilation of informal activities can become a tool for achieving more formality. The Arizona Road project envisions urban planning as a negotiation between actions and programs that come from both the formal and the informal systems.

As a result of such negotiation, a new and unpredictable process of urban communication emerges—the process I call Urban Navigation. The role of the architect is to be more of a sensor, a provoker, and a guide through urban processes than a master planner; open-endedness becomes not something to suppress, but something to make more navigable. Architectural intervention accompanies and inspires the ever-evolving process of sustainable urban development. Arizona Road questions the very premises of the master plan developed by the local government: in this case, the imposition of a shopping mall and entertainment center over an improvised popular market. As an alternative, I proposed a so-called Provocative Pole, an infrastructural element for electricity, water, canalization, TV, and advertisement. Here, Urban Navigation can be understood as a method of informal provocation. It uses existing conditions to create new ones that continually evolve in relation to urban conditions and communication processes. The aim is to advocate for self-organization harnessing an element of effective chaos.

---

Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija

Research and development: Andreas Mayer (conceptual contributions); Ilias Chatzis, Ismet Dedeic, Eamonn O`Riordan, Salih Hrnjic, Said Jamakovic, Hamed Jerkovic, Fahrudin Selimovic, Britt Tryding (interviewees)

Production: Generali Foundation Vienna; Martin Heigl (video editor)

Special thanks: Michael Stoiser

“Provocative Pole” installation, video, text-image plate (2002)

Project commissioned by the Generali Foundation Vienna for the group exhibition Designs for the Real World (2002), curated by Sabine Breitwieser and Hemma Schmutz.

Materials: Street lamp, signage, water pipes, electric cables, satellite dish, sports floor, posters, double channel-video

Dimensions: Provocative Pole, 2 x 2 x 5 m; sports ground, variable; text-image plate, 400 x 30 cm; video, 7 min 45 sec.

Also see: Akšamija, Azra, “Arizona Road,” in Designs für die wirkliche Welt [Designs for the Real World], edited by Sabine Breitwieser, 36–79. Cologne: Walther König, 2002.

Urinelke [Carnation Urinal]

If any of the people who plan or rebuild contemporary cities would take the notion of “urbanity” seriously, they would consider the public urinal to be commonplace. However, today’s city planners prefer public toilets even though these are not used very often due to their lack of hygiene and security issues. This project proposes an improved, hygienic intervention: public urinals for women and men in the shape of flowers. They would be set up around the city of Graz and stay on as permanent aesthetic components of the urban fabric. The Urinelkes are made of plastic and painted with fluorescent paint to be easily found at night. They emit a flower scent while used. For hygienic and economic reasons, their operation—the opening, closing, rinsing and release of flower scent—is completely mechanical and no touching is necessary. After every use, an Urinelke is automatically disinfected and the cleaning and disposal are necessary only twice a year.

---

Concept and production: Azra Akšamija

8 Photomontages (2000)

Proposal for Graz, Culture Capital of Europe 2003.

Materials: Poster, postcards

Dimensions: variable