Travel Agency of the Future, Islamic Project.

Above: AES+F, New Liberty (2006).

She writes: AES+F is a group of four artists from Moscow, working with the juxtaposition of East and West, as well as identity and folklore. Their Islamic Project (1996-2003) is self-described on their website as “a kind of social psychoanalysis – visualization of fears of Western society about Islam.”

For more, see the article by Dorothy Barenscott on the AES+F site.

Above: AES+F, London.

The Islamic Project (who’s creation predates 9/11) blankets five projects focusing on the world’s view of Islam and Islamic culture. It consists of: Photos, Travel Agency to the Future, Space Bedouin, Carpets, and Oasis.

Photos shows Western architectural, monumental icons re-imagined to conform to Islamic aesthetics. The Statue of Liberty receives a hijab, and La Sagrada Familia is topped by Islamic domes.

Travel Agency to the Future (1996) consists of a storefront in Moscow in which the artists set up a travel agency providing trips to their invisioning of the world in 2006. Visitors entered into a space full of t-shirts and postcards from ‘Islamified’ destinations, and were given questionnaires about their opinions about AES+F’s projected future.

Questions included: “Do you like the vision of the future we are suggesting? The future of the world? The future of Europe? The future of your town? The aesthetic, ideological, and ethical aspects of the future?”