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Azra Akšamija
explores various ways of negotiating spatial relationships of Islamic religious practices and identities in a secular and contemporary context. Her mosque projects address various states and needs of a cosmopolitan generation of Muslims, and provide a reinterpretation of the underlying histories and cultural traditions. Her projects reveal the variable typology of the mosque, which can and must adapt itself to the different contexts and cultures. One example of this is Kunstmoschee which reinterprets the art historical and architectural tradition of the Secession into a multifunctional ornamental landscape of prayer-rugs installed in public space. The other example is her Wearable Mosque project-series, clothes that can be transformed into minimal prayer-spaces, thorough which Akšamija investigates the formal limits of the mosque. While breaking down the territorial claims of religious places, she brings the aesthetic, artistic, socially constructive and educational aspects of the mosque to the fore, and transforms them into a meeting place and communication forum for people with different cultural needs. With this, Akšamija aims to shift the focus from the biased and politicized representations of Islam in favor of the beauty of artifacts from Islamic aesthetic culture.

Azra Akšamija
is an Austrian artist and architect based in Cambridge, USA. Since fall 2004 she has been affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architecture (History Theory and Criticism Section / Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture). Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1976, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University Graz, Austria in 2001, and received her M.Arch from Princeton University, USA in 2004. Her work has been widely published and exhibited in venues such as the Generali Foundation Vienna (2002), Biennial de Valencia (2003), Berlin Art Fair (2003), Graz Biennial of Media and Architecture (2003), Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig (2003), Liverpool Biennial (2004), Witte de With Rotterdam (2005), Sculpture Center New York City (2006), and Secession Vienna (2007). She is currently researching her dissertation on contemporary mosque architecture in post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina.


Azra Akšamija