Saks Afridi: SpaceMosque

Preview: written before the show opened

The first sighting was over Pakistan, where news reporters looked up, saw a hovering minaret and named it SpaceMosque. In Saks Afridi's story, as he told it on the museum's podcast, others saw a butterfly, a cube or a church, and for a while anyone on Earth could have one prayer answered every 24 hours. Everyone prayed for money first. Inflation followed, and prayer itself became the world's currency.

You walk into the Temporary Exhibitions Gallery to find that forgotten turn-of-the-millennium event told only through what is said to be left of it: recovered artifacts, sound and archival traces. Afridi, a New York artist born in Peshawar, calls the genre Sci-Fi Sufism. The project began at Aicon Contemporary in New York in 2019 and has since been shown in Vienna and Vermont.

It suits anyone happy to play along with a straight-faced fiction. Entry is included with Museum admission ($10, free for anyone 25 and under), and free for everyone on Wednesdays from 4 to 8pm.