French artist withdraws prayer rug installation from show after threats from Muslim group

From the Art Newspaper, Art News and elsewhere from AFP

 An installation by the French-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah that uses prayer mats has been removed from an exhibition in an art centre near Paris after the town council received a threat of violence from a local Muslim federation, the organisers say. “Silence”, which has already been shown in Paris, Berlin, New York and Madrid, was supposed to go on display in Clichy La Garenne, which is just north of the capital, in a woman-themed art show. The artist and curators withdrew the piece hours before the opening at the Pavillon Vendo?me in Clichy this Saturday, because the town council was warned that “irresponsible incidents” might occur if the display went ahead.

Part of the group exhibition, “Femina ou la réapproriation des modèles”, Silence, 2007-08, is an installation of 28 prayer mats with a hole cut in the centre, each with a pair of high heels placed inside. Bouabdellah, who is of Muslim heritage, explained that the piece, which has been previously shown in Paris, Berlin and New York, was about proposing a vision about the “links between profane and sacred spaces as well as the place of the woman at the threshold of these two worlds”, adding that “the modernity of women is reconcilable with Islam, on the condition that the latter is not perverted to becoming an instrument of domination”.

The artist explained that her piece was inspired by a group of Muslim feminists she had come across in Morocco, that it is an homage to strong women in the Arab world. In an open letter, Bouabdellah said: “I put this misunderstanding of the work down to the highly charged emotional atmosphere after the recent events in Paris and I do not wish [it] to be used as an excuse to further nourish confusion and distress. . .  I’m left wondering by the reasons that push a certain fringe among French Muslims to see this work as blasphemous,” she said, adding that she did not intend it to shock or provoke. Bouabdellah decided to replace “Silence” with a video installation titled “Dansons” that shows belly dancing to the French national anthem. 

Orlan, one of the 20 women artists in the exhibition, called the decision to withdraw Silence “an act of self-censorship” that is “catastrophic” and has withdrawn her own work in protest. “This act of self-censorship hides a more serious censorship,” she wrote in an open letter published on the social media platform on Sunday. “While I understand the reasoning [that led the artist and curators to remove the piece], I cannot support it as it opens the doors to all kinds of insidious restrictions of our freedom of speech, risking that we progressively move, consciously or unconsciously, from self-censorship to self-silencing, and from self-silencing to an inhibition provoked by fear,” 

The guest curators, Charlotte Boudon and Christine Ollier, the directors of Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, have now asked the mayor of Clichy, Gilles Catoire, either to publicly support the display of Silence or to close the exhibition.