Light, colour, hyperbolic scale: a monumental installation in the shape of a key with light-letters and objects inside it. I recall as many awful kitschy Christmas decorations in the front gardens of wealthy American homes in exclusive neighbourhoods. There, too, the American flag blatantly appears alongside Father Christmas. Light is a tool for perception, but it can also be used to deceive the eye. Colours are joyful aspects of everyday life, but they can also be used as symbols, and invoke a partisanship the consequences of which are often ill understood.
There is no direct causal relationship between such rallying lights and young people’s willingness to fight, kill and die for what those bright colours stand for that they loved as children. But Bush’s youngsters respond to that appeal, as do Allah’s adolescent fans. The keys lying around this gallery floor key us in on what happens between those two moments in life. The indirect link is seduction.
Many cultures have martyrs who have been seduced into willingness to die in the name of some grandiose power that shines brightly and beautifully with promises of belonging. To call this sordid waste of human life martyrdom points to something that is not exclusively a Muslim tool of seduction: the conjunction of religion and nation, the former misused as a promise that the latter cannot deliver. Paradise is one word for the fiction on the other side of the key, freedom another.

Mieke Bal is Professor of Theory of Literature and a founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).