Islamic Project: Smile of Horror

Islamic Project, the latest exhibition at the Soviart Gallery, has attracted the attention of almost the entire artistic and journalistic elite of Kyiv. The exposition represents photographic exercises aimed at showing Moslem expansion in the world. It is interesting that AYS (Tetiana Arzamasova, Lev Yevzovych, Yevhen Sviatsky) became famous thanks to this series as long ago as 1996. They adopted the simplest possible method: using a computer they turned the splendid color photos of the world’s remarkable places into illustrations of the triumphant strides of Islam. For example, Notre Dame sprouts with elegant minarets, the ruins of Tel Aviv smoke at the gun point of Arab tanks, a fully-equipped Mujaheddin detachment poses on Red Square, and a gaudy oriental bazaar flourishes on St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The greatest social success of AYS is certainly a veiled Statue of Liberty and a photo of Manhattan, where a huge mosque rises above skyscrapers, and the ill-fated twin towers are replaced with smaller minarets. What seemed to be nothing but a biting joke only five years ago is now turning into a terrible prophetic artifact which brings considerable dividends to its creators. Arzamasova, Yevzovych and Sviatsky “hit the nail on the head,” as the phrase goes. Yet, in 1996 also — amid the rumblings of the first Chechnya War, civil war carnage in Afghanistan, Muslim-Serb confrontation in the Balkans, and never-ending battle with the phantom of Saddam Hussein — both the theme and the way of its implementation seemed equally relevant. It appears that Islam will long remain something terrible for the values Western civilization.