Bijan Moosavi (b. Iran, lives in UK) | Disco Islam: Phantasmagoria Future

My name is Bijan Moosavi. I am an Iranian multi-media artist based in London. I call myself a Muslim entrepreneur and an Islamic Futurist. I make films, music, performances and installations which look at the implications of the expansion of neo-liberalism in the Middle East. My work draws upon the aesthetics of corporate advertising, sci-fi movies, popular culture and the Islamic Kitsch to tell dystopian tales of a fully neo-liberal Middle Eastern future.

'Disco Islam: Phantasmagoria Future’ is an exhibition-in-progress parting from the ‘Disco Islam’ film projected onto a fog screen — a trending commercial technology using fog layers to make a walk-through projection screen. The exhibition also brings together elements from the club culture like a disco ball and diagonally suspended LED tubes resembling nightclub laser lights. All these elements are also placed over a layer of sand, covering the surface of the gallery and acting as a metaphor for environmental disasters.

As neo-liberalism becomes the dominant ideology of the late capitalist societies in the West, its economic policies are often prescribed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank as the only way towards growth, freedom and democracy in the global south and the Middle East. To speculate on a perfect neo-liberal Middle Eastern future, ‘Disco Islam: Phantasmagoria Future’ takes up some of the key neo-liberal policies —such as privatization, deregulation, free trade, market competition, austerity, reduction in government size —, and feeds them through various aspects of the club culture (space historically associated with subversive freedom). In this way, the show turns the gallery into a neo-liberal Middle Eastern nightclub belonging to the future.

Replicating the aesthetics of the corporate world, I use elements of the club culture and the techno-utopian solutions from Silicon Valley. ‘Disco Islam: Phantasmagoria Future’ eventually creates a nightmarish smoke and mirror vision of a future nightclub in the region where the human rights violations of authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes are traded in favour of international business. In this vision, inequalities drive local crimes and are dealt with hovering ‘killer drones’; issues of dancing in Islamic law are addressed by turning people into ‘gender-less avatars’, while cultural censorship is dictated using AI. Finally, crony characters from the private sector ignore and sacrifice environmental catastrophes (such as regional draughts) in return for profit. 

Welcome to ‘Disco Islam’: A Middle Eastern phantasmagoria from the future.

I am very much interested in having a conversation with a curator regarding the possibility of exhibiting this new project. I would appreciate your suggestions and I'd be very happy to discuss the project in more details with you.

Just drop me a line at [email protected] You can also find out more about my work through my website on https://bijanmoosavi.com or my Instagram page via https://www.instagram.com/bijanmoosavi/.