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‘Iconoclasm takes different forms. To begin with, religious iconoclasm is a practical expression of the ban on idol worship. That can lead to physical destruction or damage to the images of the ‘false’ gods, but within a different context, this imagery can also take on new meaning. In countless museums, you find idolatrous images and religious works that we no longer worship or glorify for their religious and ritual value, but appreciate for their value as an object of art. You could even say that the prohibition of idolatry has advanced the cause of the museum. Even the Taliban originally wanted to keep the Bamyan Buddhas as a form of inheritance.’

‘Serrano’s work was seen by conservative Christians as blasphemy. It was all right to depict Christ, but when Christ floats around in urine, as he did in Serrano’s case, it caused offence. When another interdiction was infringed upon, as was the case in the caricatured illustration of Mohamed, who must not be pictured because it could lead to idolatry, the discourses on idolatry and blasphemy become inextricably entangled. Such events as these make up a part of our permanent culture of indignation and excitement, one that is primarily about identity. It is about, “I feel hurt by this.” I want to avoid my project becoming a kind of inventory of cases or incidences of outrage.’

‘Traces du Sacré was a quasi-encyclopaedic lucky bag about all forms and shapes of religion in relation to modern art. It included fascinating material, but in my exhibition, I do not want a broad reach. I absolutely want to put monotheism at the centre, and indeed, just a single, essential aspect of monotheism. We moreover certainly do not want the story – of monotheism that began to break up under the pressure of secularization to now experience a wondrous resurrection – simply to be taken as truth. Apart from the fact that monotheism is more tenacious in the West than people on the Amsterdam canals want to assume, religion now seems more often to be a question of statements on the Internet and controversies about images that in turn produce new images, than about the everyday ritual experience that people traditionally associate with it. As prominent a theologian Abdolkarim Soroush has remarked that even, or indeed precisely, those regimes that present themselves as hyper-Islamic in fact do not possess an actual theology worth mentioning: they are the epitome of superficiality. Theoretically speaking, contemporary Christendom is a joke when you compare it to that of previous centuries. We now have a wholly contemporary media monotheism, in which strangely enough, the most radical fundamentalists, from whom one would expect absolute aversion to the image as a source of idolatry, are the ones who are embracing video and photography.’

‘I would not say it is barely visible. In my book, I use Islamic authors of widely diverse character and background, from fundamentalists to their moderate, modernist counterparts, and in the exhibition, Lidwien van de Ven makes the contradictory relationship that contemporary Islam has with modern media literally visible. But I want to avoid the standard discourse about Islam and the generation of hysteria that it entails. In particular, I want to question the frequently postulated contrast between “Islam” and “Enlightenment” (which is then associated with “the West”. The Enlightenment and all of modern philosophy are critical of religious dogma. But from one author to another, you can still trace how that criticism evolved from monotheism. With its rejection of other gods, monotheism was always a form of criticism in its own right. It just took on the form of religion. In that sense, you can see the Enlightenment as the culmination of monotheism, as a radicalization of the tendency towards secularization, which is ingrained in monotheism. Among left-wing thinkers, who for a long time rejected anything that even hinted at religion, this is being increasingly recognized. The fact that as far back as the 1960s, the literary critic and writer Terry Eagleton believed he discerned a critical, left-leaning impulse in Catholicism was most exceptional for that time. Today, we also see that such thinkers as Savoj Zižek and Alain Badiou are becoming involved in Christianity, and this of course begs the question of how this could relate to Islam.’

‘It is true that western authors who publish comprehensive historical narratives, such as Alain Besançon and The Forbidden Image, an intellectual history of iconoclasm, do not seem to know what to do with Islam. Besançon briefly discusses Islam before coming to Christianity. You see that Islam still does not have an entrenched place in our history, and that many authors write abut that religion and Muslim societies as though they were monolithic and unchanging. That is absurd. Their developments have in fact taken a different course than Judaism and Christianity. Modernism has often been imposed from the outside and experienced as traumatic. There are now diverse theologies that are trying to change that, but they have no easy task in trying to readjust the image that fundamentalism and the western media have together created. I of course approach all of this from an art historical background, so the relationship to imagery in the various religious traditions is central – and in monotheism, more than ever, that relationship plays an essential role.’

‘In Protestantism, that tendency is indeed very strong. At a young age, Mondrian worked on his father’s handsome protestant didactic compositions. You can see a relationship between, for example, the wooden texts in protestant churches of the 17th century and modern text art, but in the case of the latter, they are of course no longer proclaiming the word of god. In my exhibition, there are text-based works, by Carl Andre and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, among others. This aspect is also covered in my book, but it obviously works differently in a text than in an exhibition. Generally, in the first part of the exhibition, at BAK, the transformation of former cult images is central, and as en extension of that, the rise of representation in abstract art and the criticism of modern art as a disguised cult, as a religion of art. In the second part, at the Centraal Museum, the accent is on both religious and left-wing criticism and their attacks on capitalism, on the society of spectacle. This is in turn again stated in coordinated terms, but what it is about is the dialogue between the works. If all is as it should be, they do not serve to illustrate a message, but form a constellation with a dynamic of its own, which creates space to be able to look and think beyond the current hysteria.’