AES+F
Graz 2006 (1997)
Photo: N. Lackner / UMJ, ©️ Bildrecht, Vienna 2024
The Islamic Project by AES+F, then a Moscow-based group of artists (founded 1987, Moscow, artists live in Berlin and New York), began in 1996 as a series of digital collages depicting major Western cities and landmarks—such as the Parisian Centre Pompidou, Sydney Opera House, and Berlin’s Reichstag—overtaken by cartoonish Islamist invaders on camels. Most provocatively, the Statue of Liberty wore a burka. At steirischer herbst ’97, the project was uniquely presented through the AES Travel Agency to the Future, a credible replica of a travel agency with posters and souvenirs.
In the 1990s, the artists might have been projecting their own mixed feelings as outsiders entering the Western art scene and may have intended to create a hyperbole of Western prejudice against the Islamic world. Their allegiances were undefined. Almost thirty years later, the project looks uncomfortably like a poster for the great replacement theory popular with the New Right.
Laser print on paper, 133 × 96 cm
Neue Galerie Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum