Fascinating ongoing performance art installation at Dortmund University, where a non-denominational “silent” room has been transformed by a group of students into a Muslim prayer room, with extensive directives mandating the segregation and veiling of women.
Note, in this image, how students have turned on its side a mural depicting trees in sunlight, and re-purposed it into a woman-hiding partition.
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SILENCE = HADITH (UD‘s title) isn’t really installation art. It began as an “experiment,” in the words of a university spokeswoman, in providing a neutral quiet space for students who might want to sit in peace a bit amid the “stresses of university life.”
The experiment has gone poorly. Since the room’s inauguration in 2012 there’s been a running battle between the university and a group of Muslim students who persistently dress it up as their own. Then when female students go there for a little down time and are ordered to put on a veil and hide behind a wall – and this is just UD talking but those sound more like stressors than de-stressors – the students complain to the administration and things get more stressful still.
So Tranquillity Base has been abandoned.