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While our bosses were in Switzerland a few weeks ago for the Art Fair in Basel, I was linked to a site that was using one of our artists images, Patricia Piccinini's "The Leather Landscape."

Now, this isn't something all that unusual, in my opinion, as last year I spotted a couple of her images of similarly odd creatures (different work) on a fairly known blog that tends to just be an excuse to sell porn, Stileproject.
(Oh, you should've heard some of the most irritating people go on and on about me not having a girlfriend and looking at sites like these...)

However, this instance was very different, mainly in the way it was used:
Link to Arabic site
Roughly translated (with the help of such nifty services like SysTran), it follows the story of a young girl who dropped the Koran (Qu'ran I think is correct, too) and as a result of her doing so, God (Allah) got quite pissed and turned her into one of those creatures.

Now, a lot of the people there, including myself, had a bit of a chuckle at the thought of this after reading what it translated to, however, that bit of entertainment quickly turned into something a tad more disturbing as you'll see when you see how many follow-up posts people have made that actually believe it's true or even discuss the possibilities that it's true.

Okay, so flash forward to yesterday. I've kept this site bookmarked in my browser, and that's pretty nifty because yesterday, one of the bosses comes in and asks if someone's told me about the problem they're having with one of Patricia Piccinini's images.
I pretty much said, "Oh, you mean this one" and brought up the link.

It had changed, and from what I could see... twice.

You'll notice that there are two sections, almost like headlines, in red.

As far as I can tell, they're updates.

Now, SysTran doesn't do a fantastic job at translating sentence structure so I had to work with words that made no sense, but from what I remember (and I have the translated text sitting at work in a document... I'll post it tomorrow if you want...), the first update warns that people on the Internet are attempting to deny the truth of this information and the act of Allah, whereas the second one says pretty much the same thing, but instead of blaming the Internet, goes so far as to blame the "nation of uncles"... sound like America to you? ("nation of uncles" --> "Nation" & "Uncle Sam").

Now, I know Piccinini's work and yes, it's weird, and fairly realistic, but this shows an absolutely different way of thinking and what essentially the fear of God can sometimes do to people.

In trying to interpret these pages, I've also had to look at a different way of reading the calendar which, if you'll notice, is very different from our own.

I eventually got it, with the help of this nifty calendar converter.
To help you understand a little bit more about not only how long these discussions have been going but how different the calendar is to our own Gregorian calendar, today's date (as of this posting is) 1426 (year), 6 (month), 1 (day).

This whole incident highlights a different way of thinking for a group of people.

While I'm not one who thinks this is art, you'd never see me go so far to say that this could ever be conceived as a wrath of God as it's just not logical.

It is odd... but I'd figure I'd post it so others could see what a truly different, if not a bit ignorant, way of thinking actually is.

My head is a mess and i didn't know what that was about, but the images kinda freaked me out at 2am.

Fantastic Leigh, thanks.

It is not hard to see why we (ie, for the sake of this discussion, westerners) cannot understand the thinking and motivations of people from the middle east and vice versa. At the risk of grossly generalising, the two ways of thinking are not only different, but almost mutually incomprehensible.

The events in London overnight are an example - our leaders call those events barbaric, the perpetrators consider their actions to be god's will.

It is an incredibly wide chasm, and it is hard to see how there can ever be resolution and peace.

And that's one of the reasons I posted it, actually.

Now that another act of terrorism has occurred, we'll probably see more racism against people of Middle Eastern descent and for that, the human race essentially devolves another notch.

While this post, this concept that another group of people can find this artwork as terrifyingly real is somewhat comedic for us, and also shows that another group of thinking may not be like ours, and yet this is a group of thinking that we have to live with in the world because, an opinion is an opinion is an opinion, and we have no right to ask someone to change it if they don't want to.

While I can't for the life of me see a possible explanation for a deity of any sort wanting its followers to commit acts of violence on another group of people (the whole concept completely defeats the point of a lot of the religion), it's just one of those views of life that we have to live with, even if it is entirely barbaric.

I just hope that this doesn't take humanity down a notch again and start getting over paranoid about every possible situation or over inquisitive about everyone's past, especially from where they're from.

We just need to respect each others beliefs, treat other people like you would like to be treated.

The Qur'an preaches that islam is not about hate rather peace and understanding.

these terrorists use a warped view of islamic fundamentalism as a convenient excuse to justify their terrible acts, they are not muslim at all, they are just murderers!

Wendell, all religion if you remove the details fundamentally revolves around peace and working for the next person's happiness and humanity.

Somewhere along the path, chinese whisper syndrome came in and corrupted teachings were born.

We live in a world of misinformation, perverse mentality, self-interest and greed. Our leaders are no exception.
I still find it hard to understand how it can be commercialy good to show uninterrupted images of a carnage. People just love it! I was waiting for the result of the cricket and sport did not even get mentioned on the ABC... Very sad indeed!
Cheers,
G. Lamy

We lost the cricket glamy...

I just came across this article from the Times which tries to explain the motivation of the terrorists and again highlights the huge difference in thought patterns... A very interesting read... It's changed my view of things slightly.