Digital Church & Al Aqsa Park

A Digital Translation of a Biblical Story, 2007

In his video work A Digital Translation for a Biblical Story, the artist reads out the Maryam (Maria) Suras (1-36) from the Qur'an while pacing up and down in the baroque church of the Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland, in front of the altar.

The film is shown as a video installation inside an archaic cabana built with wooden branches. The Muslim artist reads the sura about Maria, Mother of God, in a pristine praying room. This prayer concerns both religions, Christianity and Islam, emphasizing the intercommunity of both, perhaps all, religions.

Al Aqsa Park, 2006

Al Aqsa Park is an animated film installation where the Dome of the Rock, the symbolic referring to the Al-Aqsa complex in Jerusalem, is displayed as a fairground carousel. Although the work brings an additional reflection on the intersection of the discourses of political systems and religiosity, the Al Aqsa Park installation is essentially centered on the idea of controlled entertainment that the experience of riding a carousel, as well as its spectacle, delivers. The carousel, conventionally the center-piece of a fair, circling at a speed to generate weightlessness and ‘freedom’, is actually a machine maneuvered by an operator, according to a tightly controlled schedule.

Al-Aqsa mosque is the third most important mosque in Islam after al Masjid al-Haram (The sacred Mosque) in Mecca then Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (The Prophet's Mosque) in Medina.