Golden Age Of Grotesque
On my way to work, I am used to visit Kadj Square in Tehran, everyday. A few months ago an interesting change happened silently there: a mosque generously hosted a modern bank at a corner of its building. I found something weird in this scene, although I couldn't explain it -maybe due to shock.
There is a constant and ongoing strife for religion-izing everything in our country. Everyday we expect to find another injection of religion in our life. A typical example took part months ago when they started to send blessing to Mohammad and his family at the beginning of the news in the TV. From then on, every few days we've found a new silly program on the radio and the TV, starting in the same way. Our government is trying to boast itself more and more dedicated to religion.
Jung says, when someone strives to act in an extremely good manner, he/she is really hiding an evil aspect of his/her character. The same thing is true about our government. They are not honest. Everybody knows they are deceiving people.
Let's return to our starting point. In this -so called- ‘perfect Islamic’ country, every aspect of social life has to conform the Islamic rules. They build mosques, for example, in public places such as universities and bureaus to make them Islamic. But the fore-mentioned architectural masterpiece reverses the direction: it demonstrates ‘Economized Religion’ (in contrast with their claimed Religious/Islamic Economy), a religious place turned into financial use. The situation is grotesque compared to what we are accustomed to see, it is miserably funny. That's the reason it shocked me so much at the first sight.
Freud interpreted unintended mistakes in speech as moments when human subconscious reveals itself to the world. In the same way, this bank-in-a-mosque can be taken as an ‘unintended mistake in architecture’ which ironically reveals what They conceal from the public -and perhaps from themselves: their subconscious, their true Self, their hypocrisy.
There is a constant and ongoing strife for religion-izing everything in our country. Everyday we expect to find another injection of religion in our life. A typical example took part months ago when they started to send blessing to Mohammad and his family at the beginning of the news in the TV. From then on, every few days we've found a new silly program on the radio and the TV, starting in the same way. Our government is trying to boast itself more and more dedicated to religion.
Jung says, when someone strives to act in an extremely good manner, he/she is really hiding an evil aspect of his/her character. The same thing is true about our government. They are not honest. Everybody knows they are deceiving people.
Let's return to our starting point. In this -so called- ‘perfect Islamic’ country, every aspect of social life has to conform the Islamic rules. They build mosques, for example, in public places such as universities and bureaus to make them Islamic. But the fore-mentioned architectural masterpiece reverses the direction: it demonstrates ‘Economized Religion’ (in contrast with their claimed Religious/Islamic Economy), a religious place turned into financial use. The situation is grotesque compared to what we are accustomed to see, it is miserably funny. That's the reason it shocked me so much at the first sight.
Freud interpreted unintended mistakes in speech as moments when human subconscious reveals itself to the world. In the same way, this bank-in-a-mosque can be taken as an ‘unintended mistake in architecture’ which ironically reveals what They conceal from the public -and perhaps from themselves: their subconscious, their true Self, their hypocrisy.
posted by MohammadZ | 23:09
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