The Ship of Tolerance, the first in a series of installations by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, was launched in 2005 on a saltwater lake in the Siwa Oasis in Egypt.

The Kabakovs picked Siwa, on the border of the Libyan Desert, for many reasons, among them its ancient mythology and modern isolation. The site of Cleopatra’s fabled pool and home of the Siwan Oracle visited by Alexander the Great, it is today a secluded town of date farmers. The Kabakovs, who are Jewish, gave lessons in drawing to the schoolchildren involved in the project, most of whom had never taken an art class—nor had they ever met foreigners or seen a boat before, because Siwa is far from the ocean and no one tries to sail on the brackish lake.

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