On 2/29/2008 galantarie wrote in the Pope Benedict and Islam thread:
BERLIN EXHIBITION CLOSED
The exhibition, which also satirizes Jewish extremists
By David Gordon Smith
A Berlin gallery has closed an exhibition of satirical art by the controversial Danish group Surrend after receiving threats from a group of Muslims. The men were objecting to a picture of the Kaaba at Mecca under the title "Dumb Stone."
Egesborg says, "It would be dangerous for art in Europe, as it would give a good example of what threats can achieve."
AFPIt is not the first time that the Surrend artists have courted controversy. In January, they put up posters in Copenhagen showing the Danish royal family guillotined. In recent years they have made headlines with edgy works such as a satirical advertisement against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which was printed in an Iranian newspaper and street art in Berlin satirizing German neo-Nazis.
DPAThe gallery decided to close the exhibition on Tuesday after a group of men came to the gallery and demanded that one of the images in the exhibition be removed. The picture shows the black cube-shaped structure known as the Kaaba in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, under the headline "Dumb Stone." The men, who are believed to be Muslims, are reported to have threatened the staff with violence if the picture was not taken down.
Berlin's Galerie Nord closed its doors this week after a group of Muslims walked into the gallery and threatened staff with violence."It was a very explosive situation," Jan Egesborg, whose satirical art group Surrend created the Galerie Nord exhibition, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "We don't want to be part of the current Islamophobic tendency in Europe. We weren't trying to provoke Muslims."
The exhibition, called "ZOG -- Surrend," opened last Friday and was scheduled to run until the end of March. Conceived by the controversial Danish satirical art group, it included a picture of the black, cube-shaped Kaaba in the Muslim holy city of Mecca. Above the image, a headline read "Dumb Stone." Gallery manager Ralf Hartmann decided on Tuesday to shut down the show after six men believed to have been Muslims turned up demanding that the image be removed. The men reportedly threatened the staff with violence should they not comply.
The president of Berlin's influential Academy of Arts, Klaus Staeck, who opened the exhibition last week, expressed his support for the Danish group Friday. "I extend my solidarity to all artists ... whose work is threatened by violent people who hold different beliefs," Staeck said, adding that he hoped the exhibition could re-open soon.
Egesborg, one of the four artists who created the works in the exhibition, said that the exhibition was intended to satirize the far-right "Zionist Occupied Government" (ZOG) conspiracy theory, which holds that groups of Jews are secretly running certain countries. "If we were trying to provoke anyone, then it was the neo-Nazis," Egesborg said.A Danish Illustrator's Life in Hiding
A Struggle for European Values
It wouldn't have occurred to Westergaard in his wildest dreams that the cartoon would turn into a symbol of the struggle over European values of tolerance and freedom of the press.
By Manfred Ertel in Copenhagen
The Danish cartoon controversy has had a murderous epilogue. Since Kurt Westergaard acquired dubious fame because of his cartoon drawings depicting the Prophet Muhammad and began receiving death threats, he has been forced to live in hiding and under police protection.
Whenever something is rotten in the state of Denmark, its subjects like to remember the legendary Holger Danske, a man on whom the nation could pin its hopes. He has been in a deep sleep for centuries in the dark cellar of Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, the home of Hamlet and of able-bodied Nordic men who have guarded the entrance to the Øresund for eons. Only when the kingdom faces serious danger -- so goes the legend, at any rate -- will Holger Danske awaken and rise up for his people.
"All you have to do is think of me," Holger tells his fellow Danes in the eponymous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, "and I will be there in your hour of need."
Many Danes have thought of Holger Danske in recent months, especially those who see their culture threatened. This has been the case since the question of whether religion can be depicted as the subject of satire and the Prophet Muhammad as a caricature has been answered with mass demonstrations and arson -- and since Jyllands-Posten, a Danish daily newspaper published in provincial Jutland region that is relatively insignificant internationally, has been making headlines in places like Pakistan, Kuwait and Syria. In these difficult times, many believe, he has finally arisen, this "old Dane whose praises we all sing," as a reader of Jyllands-Posten wrote poetically in a letter to the editor. "We're finally waking up to reality."
Today's Holger is actually named Kurt -- Kurt Westergaard. He is 73 years old, a charming, elderly man with a gray beard and a penchant for eccentric clothes, like bright-red trousers, red socks, a colorful ascot, a floor-length leather coat and a cowboy hat.
Westergaard is a painter and draftsman. He and his colleagues in Scandinavia are known as bladettegner -- newspaper illustrators. He drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb and a lit fuse in his turban. It is only one of 12 caricatures Westergaard calls the "dirty dozen" and that unleashed a powerful storm of protests in the Islamic world a little over two years ago.
But it's the most provocative one. Since it appeared in Jyllands-Posten, old Kurt, who never quite made it as a painter, is suddenly a household name from Cairo to Damascus and, more recently, among Islamic fanatics in his own country.
"I was just doing my job," says Westergaard. Unlike some of his colleagues, he still sees no reason to distance himself from his drawing and bow to the pressure of the street. When the newspaper asked him to draw the cartoon more than two years ago, he had no reservations. "Of course I had to do my job. And from a purely technical standpoint, it wasn't exactly a difficult task."
