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BEIRUT: Eight months from now, Denmark is going to look like the Middle East in miniature. Nine cities throughout the country, plus one city in Sweden, are preparing to host a festival of 500 artists from Morocco to Iran, Turkey to Yemen - including filmmakers, musicians, dancers, playwrights, novelists, poets, photographers, painters, performers, architects, designers and more, all gathered under the banner "Images of the Middle East."

Organized by the Danish Center for Culture and Development (DCCD), an organization that is technically independent but funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, the "Images of the Middle East" festival is part of broader, more long-term project that incorporates educational and cultural programming, including artists' residencies and academic conferences, which will extend through 2007. It will be the sixth such "image" festival to take place in Denmark, following "Images of Africa" in 1991, 1993 and 1996, and "Images of Asia" in 2003. Michael Irving Jensen, who is DCCD's head of Middle East projects, says he hopes to mount a second "Images of the Middle East" festival in 2007.

Jensen has been traveling extensively in the region of late, to do research and establish relationships with local culture ministers (such as Lebanon's Tarek Mitri), media outlets (such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia in the Gulf) and potential funding bodies. Though centrally organized by the DCCD, the "Images" project involves a wide network of local and international institutions, from official to grassroots. As such, Jensen says the overall budget is too complex to pin down in a single figure, but will easily reach "several million euros."

"Images of the Middle East," which is scheduled to open on August 12, 2006, will encapsulate an overarching theme, "Identity in the Process of Change," which will in turn break down into three sub-themes: "Space," "Generations" and "Gender."

The tentative line-up of participating artists, which will be finalized in the next three months, so far includes a lot of usual suspects. But during a recent visit to Beirut, Jensen was keen to stress that he wants the festival to reflect the region's full range of cultural production, from critical, experimental and contemporary artists on the one hand to traditional, nostalgic folklorists on the other. In terms of music, for example, he wants to present conventional oud players alongside radical hip-hop artists.

"We will not prevent artists from being provocative," he says. "But we will not choose artists just to provoke. And we will also choose artists who are in conformity with the norm."

When asked how the "Images" projects will differ from other such comprehensive exhibitions and regional surveys - such as "DisORIENTation," which was held at Berlin's House of World Cultures in 2003, or "Languages of the Desert," a show of new art from the Gulf which was on view at the Kunstmuseum Bonn this past fall - Jensen answers succinctly: "It's bigger."

Size notwithstanding, there is always a kind of queasiness about events like these, which, when taken cynically, can seem like circus celebrations of otherness, or as one Cairo gallery owner put it recently, like ethnic marketing which serves, in the end, to exploit artists for the sake of political exercise.

Jensen insists that his primary target is in fact the Danish public, "to give them the tools to reflect on what the Middle East is, to create an opening, the possibility of new thinking, with existing ideas challenged or confirmed."

"But I have listened to artists when traveling in the region," he adds, "and I know they are dissatisfied, basically," with previous shows that have been organized along regionally specific lines and exported to Europe, "because they are not in contact with other artists and audiences."

Jensen is trying to rectify this with residency programs and workshops. "We are hoping to create contacts and genuine cooperation on the longer term."

"Images of the Middle East" is also unusual in its definition of the region as 22 countries including Turkey, Iran and Israel. When asked if he anticipates potential problems, particularly given that cultural traffic remains a sensitive issue for artists living in Arab states without a peace treaty with Israel, Jensen says: "We are not going to force people to do anything they don't want to do. Our purpose is to create more understanding. But we are not putting on a peace conference."