Every year, in the series Local Heroes, CBK Zuidoost invites artists from Amsterdam Southeast to make an exhibition with recent and / or new work. This time the exhibition space will be given to Nasam Abboud and Yazan Maksoud who live and work in Amsterdam Southeast since 2016. Abboud and Maksoud are a love couple and an artist duo. For Pop-up Mosque they have invited artists Amjad Hashem, Roua Jafar, Oussama Diab and performer Maya Jaber to create the exhibition with them. 

The artists present five works of art in Pop-up Mosque. The figure "5" refers to the five daily prayers with which the Muslim mosque defines the day. These five daily prayers are related in time to the position of the sun. With this ecological identity, the artists want to take the audience on a trip along five journeys / five concepts / five works of art. 

Pop-up Mosque is the sound of cultures, sheds light on concepts such as authenticity and altitude, and corresponding aesthetic perceptions. It is a personal consciousness of cultural traces that focus on traditional Islamic art manifestations and transformations. It reinforces the refusal of an identity formed by violence and hatred. It is an alarm, a call for necessary refinement, room for integration and consolidation for breaking through aesthetic obstruction. Pop-up Mosque is a "Sufi extravaganza", and self-preservation of memory through post-modern disruption focused on quotes and dialogue with the past.


 This experience investigates relationships between religious and cultural value systems in our society. By not expressing important political statements, room is made for addressing this subject in the most intimate manner.

 These artists accentuate and show the beauty of Islamic phenomena and show how technical precision and artistic vision are successfully united. At the same time, the visual language of the artists transcends the reference to Islamic manifestations: it shows the abstract beauty of Sufism and freedom expression that seem to be synchronized with the current spirit of the times.

Pop-up Mosque gives a pause to reconsider vaulting values in your own cultural fantasy. The artists breathe new life into society, but are trapped in images that were previously carved and transferred. This interface is of great importance. Herein Pop-up Mosque is a representation of spiritual states, it paraphrases its environment and presents it to society with a particular view of revealing the stereotype. 

The artistic vision is constructed in a collective process from an international context between the five artists and collaborators, in which a dialogue is created by using self-political interaction with Islamic culture, this creates a language about craftsmanship and beauty that inspires their position in this exhibition.

Pop-up Mosque was created to give these artists and their audience the opportunity to talk freely, without disruption, and to address abstract stories focused on topics of elevation, adequate integration, a stable existence and open societies with regard to issues of discrepancy on public and private identities.