“I want to do with carpets anything that I can with all the instruments that exist, so no one can even do anything with them in the coming 100 years,” boldly declared Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed in an email, as if penning his personal manifesto.
Recently, his experimental and, at times, sculptural versions of Middle Eastern carpets have been spotted everywhere from the Venice Biennale to Dubai’s financial center. Ahmed reshapes traditional motifs in his hypnotizing, hand-woven works, creating rugs that must be reckoned with rather than walked upon. In some pieces, patterns appear to bubble or melt into oil slicks of color. In others, graffiti-style lettering, cartoon characters, or pixel-like blocks overlap with the typical, ornate flourishes. Ahmed inserts elements of contemporary culture into objects culled from a longstanding tradition.
Many Western readers are familiar with Persian rug knock-offs spun from acrylic threads and perhaps even grew up with them in their homes. These ornate carpets entered the European consciousness as early as the thirteenth century. Renaissance paintings often feature them in the backgrounds of Annunciation scenes and portraits of the Virgin Mary. Commodified and removed from their original context over the centuries, these carpets have been fundamentally stripped of meaning and turned into kitsch objects in Europe and the U.S.
But in Azerbaijan, carpet-making is an age-old craft as well as a source of cultural pride. Steeped in a tradition of weaving that dates back to the fourth millennium BCE, these decorative objects are a ubiquitous feature of Azerbaijani homes to this day. With a variety of regional schools within the nation, Azerbaijani rugs stand out from other Middle Eastern traditions with their angular, geometric designs.
“Taking into consideration this deep influence of tradition, the carpet is still a symbol of home, coziness, family values and hospitality,” commented Ahmed.
In taking this traditional object and redefining it, the artist presents his Middle Eastern and international audiences with an invitation to rethink the ways the past influences the present. Moreover, he encourages us to consider which aspects of tradition are worth holding on to.
Before he began working with carpets, Ahmed said, he thought of their structure as unshakeable. Though carpets may seem mundane and perhaps even trivial, this statement is revelatory with regard to the ways many of us accept the norms with which we have been socialized—whether they pertain to our religious upbringing, the messages that surround us in mass media, or otherwise. When certain customs are passed down through generations or ingrained in us from an early age, they carry with them implicit beliefs and worldviews. Thinking critically about which cultural mores we accept into our lives allows us to utilize history to define the present for ourselves.
“Azerbaijan has lots of interesting and beautiful traditions, but some of them should be left behind like a ballast,” said Ahmed. “Azerbaijani people are very flexible and can easily mix past and present, but there are clashes between different generations. You can never build anything new without breaking the old. There is nothing eternal.”