Disco Islam: Future Phantasmagoria

Disco Islam: Future Phantasmagoria is an immersive installation which fills the gallery space with light, sound, sand and glitter, to conjure up a dystopian image of a fully neoliberal Middle Eastern nightclub from the future.

This installation is centred around the artist’s Disco Islam film: a sci-fi commercial video that uses CGI, live-action, Islamic kitsch and music to promote a fictional Iranian nightclub belonging to a not-so-distant dystopian future. It also brings together ready-made objects that reference the club culture, the desert and the world of corporate advertising, in order to create an immersive environment where ecological, socio-economic and human rights issues caused by the expansion of neoliberalism in the Middle East start to unravel.

As neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology in late capitalist societies in the West, economic policies prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have been presented as the only way towards growth, freedom and democracy in the Global South and the Middle East. Disco Islam: Future Phantasmagoria speculates on a ‘perfect’ neoliberal Middle Eastern future – privatized, deregulated and market oriented – where the aesthetics of advertising and commerce, environmental catastrophes and the club culture combine with techno-utopian solutions from the Silicon Valley.

In Disco Islam: Future Phantasmagoria, Bijan offers a vision of a world where authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes’ human rights violations are traded in favour of international business, local crimes driven by inequalities are solved by hovering ‘killer drones’, restrictions prescribed by Islamic law are addressed by transforming individuals into ‘gender-less avatars’, cultural censorship is applied using AI, and environmental disasters are ignored by a private sector obsessed with profit. Welcome to Disco Islam: A Middle Eastern horror show from the future.

Disco Islam: Future Phantasmagoria was selected for the EOP Members Show opportunity in 2021 and it was produced with the help and support of the Eastside Projects in Birmingham. The exhibition was held at Eastside Project’s second gallery from June 4th to August 6th, 2022. For more information about this exhibition click here.