This buffet represents an interactive artistic intervention set up as a part of the event “[Boston] Intercultural Mixer: Discover Bosnia” at American Islamic Congress (AIC) in Boston, USA. All attendees were invited to participate. A map of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been sown onto the tablecloth. The food was arranged along the internal political borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that is: the border of the Serb Republic and the cantons of the Bosniak-Croat Federation, as they were settled in the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. Paradoxically, the American-brokered compromise made for the sake of peace was intended to maintain Bosnian unity, but in practice it also induced an internal political fragmentation of the country. While these internal lines of separation that were created though the genocide and the “ethnic cleansing,” the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement de-facto legalized the artificial division of the Bosnian population along clear-cut ethnic and national categories.  As the event partiicpants enjoyed the tasty treats, they were also  symbolically  “eating away” the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Visitors originating from Bosnia were invited to stick a toothpick on this tablecloth-map, marking the place that they come from. This interactive engagement of the visitors aimed to render visible a map of Bosnian diasporic community in the Boston area. This project was photographically documented throughout its different stages during the evening.

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Azra Akšamija, Digesting Dayton, 2012

Table cloth, Bosnian beef sausages and dried meet, cherry tomatoes, toothpicks with US flags

Produced for the ”[Boston] Intercultural Mixer: Discover Bosnia” at American Islamic Congress (AIC) in Boston, USA / 27 Apr. 2012 / Organized by Edina Škaljiċ. Conceptual contributions: Dietmar Offenhuber.

Monument in Waiting is a collective testimony of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina, carried out by nationalist extremists during the war of 1992-95. This process of territorial and cultural ‘decontamination’ involved the eviction and mass murder of civilians, as well as the extermination of their cultural and historical traces. Places of worship being particularly targeted, destroying the previous period of peaceful co-habitation. While all ethnicities suffered destruction or damage of their cultural heritage, the quantity of destroyed mosques far outweighs the number of destroyed churches. The pattern of this hand-woven kilim tells the story of the systematic devastation of Islamic cultural heritage during the war and points at the impact of this erasure of memory on the Bosniaks’ religious, ethnic, and national identities today.

The project started with the historical and archival research of 250 out of over 1000 mosques that have been deliberately damaged or destroyed by nationalist extremists during the war. Nine case studies were chosen for a more detailed investigation. Interviews with a range of individuals engaged in the current mosque building and rebuilding process gave insight into individual war experiences, mosque histories and stylistic choices for new designs. The research material was then abstracted as kilim symbols. Each kilim symbol is thus encoded with both personal memories and historical facts, and their interweaving makes visible the collective memory of the Bosniaks’ war experience. Such a collective design process enabled the translation of the traditional Bosnian kilim iconography into a contemporary context – locally found patterns and symbols were converted into signifiers of political, military aggression and threatened collectivity, while providing a multitude of outlooks into the future of the Bosniak nation. Acknowledging that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has recognized the destruction of religious architecture as evidence of a targeted annihilation of Bosnian multiculturalism, this kilim is waiting to be displayed in the ICTY, where it will actualize its function as a monument.

The kilim was produced in collaboration with Amila Smajović and her Sarajevo based workshop “STILL-A,” which employs refugee women as weavers. Three kilim borders, which usually symbolize levels of ‘cleansing’ and ‘protection’ of the central kilim surface, are inspired by the Afghan war rugs. They are filled with traditional local motifs, transformed into weapon-like symbols to describe the Bosnian war. The three borders siege the central composition with the ‘tree of life’ motif, the metaphor of the paradise garden and eternal afterlife. This tree tells the main kilim story. Each tree branch carries symbols that represent abstracted data and stories about the investigated mosques. By providing directionality in reading, the central composition shapes a double mihrab, an indicator of the Mecca direction. The top of the kilim is intentionally left unfinished to indicate the continuing process towards closure through therapeutic means such as weaving, and that working to restore the architectural and emotional devastation in Bosnia-Herzegovina could become an endless process. The initiation of this process is visually communicated through the motif of the growing ‘tree of life’, to which new branches with new stories can be woven. Yet, these stories would need to encompass all the destroyed mosques, churches, and all other lost monuments in Bosnia-Herzegovina. While the completion of this project remains utopian, the ritual hanging of the 99 prayer beads onto the kilim edge symbolically launches the process.

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Azra Akšamija, Monument in Waiting, 2008

Hand-woven wool kilim (2,5 x 3 m), 99 prayer beads, 2 booklets

Produced for the group show Since We Last Spoke About Monuments at The Stroom Den Haag / 14 Sep. – 09 Nov. 2008 / Curated by Mihnea Mircan. Conceptual contributions: Khadija Z. Carroll, Mihnea Mircan, Dietmar Offenhuber, Alex Schweder, Amila Smajović. Consulting in pattern design: Amila Smajović (artist and kilim expert from Sarajevo). Kilim manufacture: STILL-A Sarajevo (owner A. Smajović, www.stilla.ba). Thanks to: Ibrahim and Munira Aksamija, project participants, conceptual contributors, project producers, interview partners, Center for Islamic Architecture at the Rijaset Sarajevo, Gerhard Diermoser, Asja Mandić, Dietmar Offenhuber,  András J. Riedlmayer, Andreas Spiegl, kilim weavers, and the team of The Stroom.

The KUNSTMOSCHEE is an interactive installation located on the external grounds of the Secession from July 20^th through September 30^th, 2007. Thematically, it concerns the interrelationships between architecture, territorial and visual manifestations of religion, identity politics and cultural patterns of Western Europe today. KUNSTMOSCHEE is a hybrid of the sacred and the secular space that brings the aesthetic, artistic, socially constructive and educational aspects of the mosque to the fore in order to instigate a constructive intercultural dialogue. The artistic context provides a possibility negotiating and reinterpreting the traditional forms and functions of the mosque in a contemporary context.

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 an opportunity for relaxing or seating during the larger scheduled events. KUNSTMOSCHEE becomes thus a space for gathering and communication between visitors with different cultural needs. KUNSTMOSCHEE-events include lectures, discussions, a carpet-weaving workshop, and screenings of contemporary Iranian films. This accompanying program aims to question the distorted and politicized representations of Islam in Europe and place the focus on the beauty and diversity of Islamic cultures.

While the program of the KUNSTMOSCHEE asks for a mutual enrichment of Islamic and non-Islamic cultures in Europe, the colorful rugs provide for this a shared territory. They were created by supervised groups of over forty Viennese from various age groups who were invited to participate in carpet-weaving workshops on the basis of their professional, religious, or cultural backgrounds as well as personal interests. The individual rugs will be distributed among their weavers and the program-participants at the closing ceremony to the exhibition. In this way KUNSTMOSCHEE has not only been created through a community effort, but it will also become the collective property of the Viennese.

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Azra Akšamija, Kunstmoschee [Art-Mosque], 2007

Open space installation involving ski-polls and outdoor carpets in wood

Place: Vienna, Austria. Produced within an exhibition of individual outdoor projects in Secession, Vienna / / July 15 – October 06, 2007 / Curated by Barbara Holub and Anna Mayer. Architecture, Realization, and Conceptual Collaboration. Adelheid Pretterhofer/  Arquitectos, Vienna. Project Supervisor, Coordinator, and Conceptual Collaborator: Christina Nägele / Secession, Vienna. Thanks to: Participants of the KUNSTMOSCHEE program and carpet weavers; Family Aksamija, Omar Al-Rawi, Saeed Arida, Amina Baghajati, Patrick Baumueller and Severin Hofmann, Khadija Z. Carroll, Vivien Chapeau, [ dy:na'mo ], Wolfgang Haas, Mouhanad Khorchide, Daniela Kobel, Susan Kraupp, Anneka Lenssen, MA42, Sudabeh Mortezai, Nasser Rabbat, Christian Rathner, Irvin C. Schick, Susanne Schindler, Doris Schmid, Dieter Spath, Deniz Turker, project sponsors, and above all the team and the managing board of the Secession. Sponsors: Project produced by Secession, Vienna and with a partial support by the Council for the Arts at MIT. Material sponsoring by Kodak Austria.

The Frontier Vest hybridizes different religious equipment and a contemporary vest design. This wearable prototype lends itself for different purposes, both sacred and secular. Pointing at the shared histories and belief systems of Judaism and Islam, the Frontier Vest can be transformed either into a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, or into an Islamic prayer rug. Both possibilities render very personal objects that devoted believers use in religious rituals. Originating in the nomadic life of Bedouins, and informed by the historic experience of exodus, the Frontier Vest also represents a minimal wear useful for a contemporary refugee. While the vest can be worn by both men and women, the equivalent use in Jewish and Islamic religious sermons is a task to be negotiated within the individual religious communities in the future.

While Judaism, Christianity and Islam share the belief in one God, belonging to one implies a level of exclusion from the others. Based on different religious practices, socio-psychological boundaries often generate spatial ones, which in turn reinforce these divisions further. The Frontier Vest allows for individual expressions of different belief systems. This individual wearable architecture can also be combined to generate a communal space. For this, it needs a congregation of minimally ten in Judaism (minyan), two in Islam (masjid) and three in Christianity. Yet more importantly, this individual territory can only become collective through overcoming the fear of the mutual otherness.

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Azra Akšamija, Frontier Vest, 2006

textile

Produced within the group show Liminal Spaces / Grenzräume, Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany / Oct. 28, 2006 – Jan. 21, 2007 / Exhibition is a part of the project Liminal Spaces,organized as a collaboration of the Israeli Centre for Digital Art Holon, the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Arts PACA and the University of the Arts Berlin / Curated by Galit Eilat, Reem Fadda, and Philipp Misselwitz. Conceptual contributor: Deniz Turker. Production: Azra Aksamija and Evelyn Funes. Models: Saeed, Saba, Sadia, Neri.

Based on the concept of the Nomadic Mosque (see Nomadic Mosque project description) the premise the Dirndlmoschee is the nomadic principle of assimilating certain characteristics of a place into one’s own context, whereas a mutual enrichment is achieved. The Dirndl, a traditional Austrian dress, is still worn in the every day life in some places in Austria, such as in the little town of Strobl at the 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 carabineer attached, from which prayer beets on ropes are hanging. The prayer beets are decorated with Swiss knifes, locally found souvenirs from which the crosses were not removed, but re-symbolized as a decoration. The project involved a prayer performance in various public spaces, as well as a communication with local Turkish immigrants. Although not willing to participate in the prayer, the Turkish women showed interest in the Dirndlmoschee as a product. The project video documents my daily prayer at the symposium site, – unfolding of the wearable mosque and the prayer on the pre-existing landscape sculpture in shape of concentric circles, which can be understood as a reference to Mecca. This situation also represents a reference to the famous unfolding renaissance Pacher Altar located in the neighborhood town of St.Wolfgang.

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Azra Akšamija, Dirndlmoschee [Dirndl Dress Mosque], 2005

Mixed media (re-designed Austrian traditional dress, video 5min)

Place: Stobl, Austria. Produced within the International Artist Symposium Ortung 2005 in Strobl, Austria/ Organized by Landesregierung Salzburg, symposium led by Gottfried Goiginger. Concept, idea and design: Azra Akšamija, International Patent Pending. Collaborators:Munira and Ibrahim Akšamija. Project photographs: Rahkeen Gray and Azra Akšamija. Thanks to: Major of Strobl, Veronika and Peter Hitzl, participants and organizers of the symposium Ortung 2005, who advised and informed the project development.

The project Arizona Road examines the informal urban phenomena of the Arizona Market in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, the largest black market in the Balkans at the time. The market emerged along the federal highway called “Arizona Road” during the recent war in the region. The project involves documentation of the market’s emergence, as well as a proposal for its development into a city. Assimilating the market’s existing qualities and informal organization, the project proposes an infrastructural intervention in form of the “Provocative Pole” and sports grounds.  This minimal infrastructure is aimed to improve the living and working conditions at the market and provoke its further development. The installation also suggests an architectural mediation between the formal and informal systems of spatial production that I termed Urban Navigation. The artist/architect becomes a guide of a sustainable urban development, whose final appearance is left open-ended.

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Azra Akšamija, Arizona Road, 2001

Double channel-video (7 min 45 sec), “Provocateur-Pole”, sports floor, text-image-plate

Place: Arizona Market, Bosnia and Herzegovina.Produced for the Exhibition Designs for the Real World, Generali Foundation Vienna / Sep.13 -Dec.22, 2002 / Curated by Sabine Breitwieser and Hemma Schmutz. CREDITS: Advisors: Raoul Bunschoten, Andreas Mayer, Joost Meuwissen. Collaborator: Michael Stoiser. Video editor: Martin Heigl. Interview partner: Ilias Chatzis, Ismet Dedeić, Eamonn O`Riordan, Salih Hrnjić, Said Jamaković, Hamed Jerković, Fahrudin Selimović, Britt Tryding. Exhibition Photographs: Werner Kaligofski

Skalamerija is a follow up project of my Arizona Road project from 2002. Skalamerija is a contraption aimed at a de-formalizing the Arizona Market’s current highly regulated spatial order, which has led to the market’s recession. Ever since its regulation in 2002, the trade and urban development of the Arizona Market has been decreasing, thus threatening it very existence in the future. 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 on sales of cheap imported goods in favor of alternative economic programs. 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, barbecuing, smoking meat, roasting lamb, sewing, ironing, and carpet weaving.
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Azra Akšamija, Skalamerija [Contraption], 2009

mixed media (1 sculpture, 24 photographs)

Place: Den Haag, Netherlands. Produced within the group show: Soft City at Stroom Den Haag (13. Sep. – 08 Nov. 2009). Produced by: The team of Stroom. Photos: Dubravka Sekulić. Collaborators: Ibrahim Akšamija, Dietmar Offenhuber

The project Bread and Games, Plant and Play investigates the interaction of the formal and informal systems in the process of urban revitalization. It intended to become a communicator of problems and ideas in the Liverpool L1 area by provoking a set of questions to which the community would find their own answers and solutions. The medium were plastic boxes in Biennial logo colors, which could be used for exchange of goods, ideas, skills or as event infrastructure. Local community groups were invited to develop weekly events during the Biennial, which would display the local informal production. In the initiating event people were invited to take away boxes of soil and seeds and encouraged to return with their “grown up” vegetables to the final cooking event. A weekly supply of boxes was brought to the community park. While the proposed events served as scenarios, the project was open to take any other unexpected direction as well.

The community saw the coming to the event just as an opportunity to collect boxes. The boxes soon became a new kind of currency in the area. Not surprisingly, the project team tried to bring the taking of the boxes under control. This shift from an observer to a controller role culminated in a dangerous power conflict with the local hooligans, forcing the project manager to involve police. More frustratingly all boxes were taken and the question of “where is the sculpture?” remained visibly unanswered. Yet, its real impact did not come from the physical intervention itself, but from how people used and misused it. The empty box was not only a metaphor for the lack of ideas and tools for solving community problems. It became a tracking device for its passiveness and the inability of social institutions to break out their own established methodologies. The uncertainty of the final goal and the lack of the “final sculpture” brought about instability into the established system of relationships between the involved parties. However, the box also indicated a potential for the future solving of community problems. The creative engagement of hooligans as project photographers reversed the previously established hierarchies. This action not only transformed the notion of control into collaboration, but it gained more mutual respect.

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Azra Akšamija, Bread&Games, Plant&Play, 2004

Series of events in public space involving 1000 plastic boxes and an installation in the Tate Gallery Liverpool.

Produced for the International Exhibition of the Liverpool Biennial / Sep.18 – Nov. 28, 2004. Conceptual co-author: Andreas Mayer. Project managing artists in Liverpool: Rebecca Reid and Sue Wrigley. Collaborators: Ibrahim Aksamija, Nadja Aksamija, Marc Daniels, Adrian Devers, Paul Domela, Brian Melcher, Sharon Paulger, Rebecca Reid, David Rhöse, Cath Stevenson, Sue Wrigley, and Biennial Volunteers Anna, Elpiniki, Sam, Melanie, Parabhen, Louise. Sociologist Evaluator: Julie Anderson. Boxes produced by: Really Useful Products Ltd. Plants and Compost: Lady Green Nursery.

The Lost Highway Expedition is a tour to explore the unknown future of Europe. A massive joint movement of over 200 artists and individuals traveled through nine cities in the Western Balkan (Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Priština, Tirana, Podgorica and Sarajevo) from July 30 to August 24 of 2006. Expedition participants formed a virtual and physical network of collaborations for artistic and architectural production while traveling through each city. Traveling through the politically dynamic territories of the Western Balkan, the expedition’s aim was to explore the future of Europe and find new ways of making the future civic society through the artistic process. In a series of different events, participants of the expedition interacted with each other and produced works of art, architecture and theory, while simultaneously forming a temporary society.
The Lost Highway Expedition was initiated by Centrala – Foundation for Future Cities and the School of Missing Studies [SMS] as the first event of Europe Lost and Found [ELF], a multi annual and three-phased project. Europe: Lost and Found is an interdisciplinary and multi-nationally based research project to articulate and imagine the current evolution of new and transforming borders and territories of Europe. The subject is the continent of immigration, and its depopulation and aging, and the need for redefinition of states, sovereignties and citizenships. Challenged is the established belief and practice of nation-state, including non-representative and technocratic construction of European Union yet to vision more open and alternative definitions for populous in movements. The rejection of constitutional referendum and the riots in France signal the contradiction between homogeneous and multiple identities, the fluidity of capital and containment of labor, the liberation of individuals and their restrictions under sovereignty. Clearly, Europe cannot subsist by itself, and is already being redefined by “the others” in its quest for a self-identity. In such contexts, ELF suggests the future of Europe is best seen in the Western Balkan.
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Azra Akšamija, Lost Highway Expedition [LHE], 2006

Collaborative curatorial project organizing a joint travel of over 200 individuals engaged in cultural production

Place: Western Balkans. LHE was initiated by Centrala, Foundation for Future Cities , which includes Azra Akšamija, Katherine Carl, Ana Dzokić, Ivan Kucina, Marc Neelen, Kyong Park, Marjetica Potrč and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, and the School of Missing Studies. Partner Organizations: SKUC (Ljubljana); Mama, Platforma 9.81, WHW (Zagreb), Kuda.org (Novi Sad), Prelom kolektiv, School of Missing Studies (Belgrade), Missing Identity (Priština), Press for Exit (Skopje) and SCCA/Pro.ba (Sarajevo). Photos: Ana Dzokić. Sponsors: Lost Highway Expedition is supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ljubljana and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York.  Additional in-kind support comes from LHE partner organizations in the cities of the Lost Highway Expedition, as well as from the Council for the Arts at MIT. Project Website http://www.europelostandfound.net

Tempelmarke or Temple Tag is a collaborative art project by Azra Akšamija and Dietmar Offenhuber designed for the exhibition “The Turks in Vienna,” running from 12 May  – 31 October 2010 at the Jewish Museum Vienna. The exhibition explores the history of the Jewish Sephardic community, which lived in Vienna under the protectorate of the Ottoman sultan and was known as the Turkish-Jewish community. Its synagogue, designed in Moorish style and called ”Das Türkische Tempel“ (”The Turkish Temple,” ), was inaugurated 1887 and destroyed by Nazis in 1938. The project Temple Tag aims to symbolically restore this extraordinary synagogue through the interaction of the museums’ visitors with the content of the exhibition via small wearable objects called Temple Tags.

A Temple Tag is a hybrid of a 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; this pattern provides reference to Moorish/Islamic geometry, Jewish symbolism, as well as to architectural elements of the former Turkish Temple (i.e. patterns of the carpet). The golden-metallic tag is reminiscent of the golden tiles that used to cover the interior dome of the synagogue. In its function, the Temple Tag object is used as a museum’s admission tag, which is given to the visitors with the ticket purchase. The tag also functions as an attachable 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, which can be understood as abstraction of a synagogue. Simultaneously, the shape and the function of the Temple Tag as an admission mark refers to the current existence of the synagogue only as a collection of fragmentary images, as well as to the role of the visitors as participants in the museum’s enterprise to keep the memory of the Turkish-Jewish community alive. In addition to the tag, the piece includes a video-text installation, which shows the process of knotting a Sephardic type of tzitzit. This interactive aspect of the piece is aimed at educating the visitors about the Viennese  synagogue’s history and the Jewish culture.

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Azra Akšamija, Tempelmarke  [Temple Tag], 2010

mixed media: printed 10.000 medium plastic admission tags (3,8 x  7,4 cm each), video 10 min.

Produced for the exhibition Turks in Vienna at the Jewish Museum Vienna / 12 May  – 31 Oct. 2010 / Curated by Felicitas Heinman-Jelinek, Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, Gerhard Milchram. Co-Author: Dietmar Offenhuber