Snapshots Of Islam.(Arts)(The Modern Arab World exhibit to be held in Greece)

Byline: Iason Athanasiadis

An Athens museum seeks to promote understanding of the modern Arab world.

A veiled woman passes in front of an illuminated McDonald's sign in Kuwait City. Overweight boys in djellabas drive race-car simulators in a Dubai video arcade. Syrian girls hurl snowballs at each other on a mountain resort close to Damascus. These images, part of an exhibition by the VII Photo Agency on display in the Benaki Museum of Islamic art in Athens, toy with the West's perceived wisdoms about the Arab world. "I had no idea it snows in Syria," says Hrisanthi Politopoulou, a 52-year-old Greek homemaker visiting the exhibit.

The photo project, "The Modern Arab World" (through Sept. 28), was commissioned by the private Iowa-based Stanley Foundation to help dispel stereotypes. Its exhibition in Athens marks an attempt to educate the Greek public about a region that is geographically proximate and economically intertwined, yet culturally misunderstood by Europe. Alongside Cyprus and Bulgaria, Greece forms a part of the EU's border with Muslim Turkey. Yet Many Greeks remain hostile toward Islam, owing to 400 years of Greece's occupation by the Ottoman Empire, during which Turkey's rulers pressured Greeks to convert to Islam and built hundreds of mosques in the territory, many of which were eventually torn down. Today, 12 percent of the country's work force is non-Greek, and the presence of Muslim immigrants on the streets of Athens is stoking the resentment of Greek workers competing with them in a lean economy.

The exhibition eschews the sensual scenes of Cairo and Damascus conjured by 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist painters in favor of more contemporary pictures of identikit malls and fast-food franchises in teeming cities where haphazard slums lurk in the midst of glittering skyscrapers. "Some of the photos don't look very different from Western Europe," says Yuna Delannoy, 35, a tourist from Belgium, pointing to an image of a Palestinian student wearing a kaffiyeh working at a monitor in a computer lab. "They've played upon the contrast between tradition and modernity."

Since its inception in 2004, the Benaki has ...