Public Culture, Art, and Islam: Turkish-Delight in Vienna Available to Purchase

Far from being a static receptacle and neutral to power relations, the public space is always resignified through performativity, conflict, and confrontation. Focusing on a statue by German artist Olaf Metzel, Turkish Delight, a naked woman with headscarf that was exhibited in the public garden of the Kunsthalle Museum in Vienna in 2007, this chapter examines the artistic scene as an interactive but contentious space between diverse cultures and publics. This statue violates the intimacy and piety of a Muslim woman by exposing her nakedness to the public gaze at the same time that it seeks ways to relate to the familiar Other, Turkish migrants in Europe. The controversy around the statue illustrates how the European aesthetic realm becomes a battleground for intercultural conflicts as well as a domain of borrowings and mixings between native European and immigrant Islamic, between secular and religious values.