Playing with Conventions: Faig Ahmed’s Allusive Textile Designs / Erica Warren, PhD 36
Mystical Guides and Cultural Landscapes in the Work of Faig Ahmed / Fahmida Suleman, PhD 40
The Dragon in Islamic Art / Anushka Hosain 48
56 SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONs
Points of Perception / Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome 58
Nə Var, Odur / YARAT Contemporary Art Centre 76
Equation / Textile Museum of Sweden 102
Collision / The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art 116
124 Selected Group Exhibitions & BIENNALE
The 52nd Venice Biennale 2007 126
Love Me, Love Me Not, The 55th Venice Biennale, 2013 128
Jameel Prize 3, 2013 132
Hannah Ryggen Triennale 2019: New land 136
Oku-Noto Triennale 2023 142
Transform Any Room, 2023 148
154 SELECTED artworks 2010–2023
228 FAIG AHMED STuDIO AND WORKSHOP
Acknowledgements 252
List of Credits 253
Ranging, 2016
When you turn away, it returns to you once more. This symbolizes the concept of praying to oneself, seeking the divine within, creating a continuous circle of introspection and spiritual connection.
Nina: Why did you title the exhibit at the New York University “The Black Sheep”?
Faig: I will tell you the story behind it. In Azerbaijan, there is a cultural preference for white sheep over black sheep. The reason behind this preference lies in the fact that white sheep can be dyed, whereas black sheep are considered undesirable. As a result, black sheep are often viewed negatively and efforts are made to remove them from the flock by selling them or using them for meat. This notion extends symbolically to refer to individuals or things that are consistently marginalized or excluded from society.
Nina: Undesirable person, black sheep. Are you speaking of yourself?
Faig: Indeed, the perception of black sheep is not always negative in Azerbaijan. In some cases, the departure of a black sheep from the herd is seen as a sign of good luck. As it breaks away from the group, it symbolizes freedom and independence within the confines of the herd.
Nina: Faig, we have spoken about so many issues on which you have a very unique and complex point of view. Some of the most fascinating discussions we’ve had over the years were about land, land ownership, perceived value of land, which then leads to very real, and timely conversations about borders, land contours, and conflicts over these borders. Obviously when we first spoke about it, the world was not engulfed in a series of wars and border conflicts. Now, these discussions are even more critical and charged.
Perhaps we can start with the connections between land and carpets, and how both relate to property and value. You have suggested a work that placed carpet designs on the grass and soil. Perhaps because topsoil is also a carpet of sorts?
Faig: I like to begin conversations with obvious facts and
Faig Ahmed: Interpretations
Leslee Katrina Michelsen, PhD
Detail of DNA, 2016
Leslee Katrina Michelsen is a global curator of historic and contemporary visual and material heritage. She is a Board Member at ICOM-US, as well as a fellow of the Kolb Society (Penn Museum) and the Royal Asiatic Society. During 2017–2023 she was the Senior Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu, where she led the team responsible for the exhibition, interpretation, and research of the museum’s collection of historic and contemporary arts. She was the Head of the Curatorial and Research Section at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, in 2011–2016 and has worked on numerous cultural heritage and archaeology projects throughout Central Asia, South Asia, and East Africa. She is a specialist of materiality and making in Central and South Asia, in myriad mediums ranging from architecture to ceramics to textiles. She also explores contemporary museology, both by co-creating the first MA program in Museum Studies in Uzbekistan and by serving on the Steering Committee of Steppe Sisters. Leslee serves as the director of the National Museum of American Diplomacy, Washington, and earned her PhD in art history and archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Much of Faig Ahmed’s work functions as a portal, both drawing in and transporting viewers. His textile sculptures, the medium with which he is most associated, are graphically compelling in form, line, and color. As an art historian and a museum curator who has had the pleasure to liaise with Faig directly on existing and new works, and to curate his creations on several continents, it has been revelatory to interpret his work for myriad publics, many of whom had been unfamiliar with his practice before engaging with his exhibitions. Curating his artwork has provided a rich vein of opportunities for cross-cultural connections and objectbased learning in diverse museum and gallery settings — from the deeply physical experiences of kinetic tactility to the nearly limitless opportunities of the digital realm. This brief essay will cite three such curatorial examples and subsequently explore the unique opportunities for curating the global contemporary provided by Faig’s artwork.
As a curator with a background in both archaeology and cultural heritage, the core of my museum practice has always focused on materiality and making. I am particularly
interested in artists whose works challenge or ignore the arguably false dichotomies of historic/contemporary or fine arts/crafts, and the ways in which we engage with diverse audiences who have long been underserved by the traditional, and narrowly defined and implemented, museum interpretation model. It is perhaps unsurprising that the breadth of Faig’s work, as explored elsewhere in this volume, was immediately of deep interest.
Having first encountered Faig’s work at international art fairs in West and East Asia in the early 2000s, I was delighted to be able to meet him in Baku a decade later. The making contexts of his workshop, where he collaborates with weavers drawn from more traditional craft practices; the materiality of connectivity to the surrounding landscapes and organisms, in fiber and dye and texture; and the kaleidoscopic joy of his riotous patterns, informed by portable and fixed architecture of centuries and imaginations — all provided a sensorial wealth that I was eager to share with audiences.
Honolulu
The first opportunity to curate Faig’s work directly came about in 2019 in Honolulu, Hawai’i, when I was the Senior Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design. With the enthusiastic support of the then-Executive Director Dr. Konrad Ng, the artist in residence program was a key part of the museum’s mission, striving to amplify the work of makers from diverse disciplines. In exhibiting their extant work, supporting the creation of new work, and expanding public access to their processes of making, Shangri La was able to create opportunities for dialogue surrounding important facets of making — not merely materiality, but its reception in the museum world and the interpretive strands that could be enhanced from its exhibition and discussion.
I curated two exhibitions with Faig in Honolulu. The first was a display of extant works, and installed at the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA), in a gallery often generously shared by HoMA with Shangri La. I consciously chose to concentrate on the experience of time and space with Faig’s artwork, and attempted to provide as much opportunity as possible for reflective and careful looking.
Dragons of Karabakh, 2021
POINTS OF PERCEPTION
“This exhibition is the realization of the essence of my spiritual search and paths, a kind of study of the human consciousness, observed through various practices. Although the result, by which I mean the artworks themselves, can be perceived by the subconscious directly. My primary goal was to complete the total immersion into the process of observation and creation; that is why I have
personally gone through all the practices to break the boundaries of consciousness. Thus, the exhibition has become a kind of self-portrait, written by the means of the language of Sufism — a very developed and complete language allowing one to describe the mystical immersion in one’s self.”
Faig Ahmed
Limits, 2016 / Video performance
Björn Geldhof
NƏ VAR, ODUR is an old Azeri saying emphasizing a sense of imperturbability, an attitude of accepting things how they are and have been for many years in the past. It is a state of mind both fulfilling and reconciling with life how it is.
The seven newly produced works in this exhibition draw from research into the social habitat of Azeri people living outside the capital Baku. They explore gender relations and social structures within traditional Azerbaijani communities and play upon symbolic gestures, rituals, and objects specific to traditional Azeri communities. The exhibition investigates relations to sexuality and death, addressing social taboos and individual trauma.
Through this show, Ahmed urges toward an understanding of a disappearing cultural practice. Stripped of any kind of melancholy the works register traditions as Eastern practices taking place on the border between Asia and Europe, between East and West.
Ten curtains hanging one after the other, upon entering the exhibition, form a gateway. A gentle gesture named Curtain In-between (2016) blocks the view to what lies ahead. The work draws on a social reality in Azerbaijan: to hide what you cannot speak of, to cover what you would not see. Curtain In-between summarizes at the very start of the show what the exhibition urges towards by forcing the viewer quite literally to peel of the layers of hiding before confronting taboos central to Azeri community.
Nə var, odur, 2016
ROOTED IN TRADITIONS?
Asli Samadova
The only design restriction in knotted pile are conceptual. Almost any design can be rendered in rows of knots.
Marla Mallett, Woven Structures
A Guide to Oriental Rug and Textile Analysis, 1998
By now, almost everyone in the international carpet community — a relatively small group of carpet scholars, collectors, dealers, and textile aficionados — have heard of Faig Ahmed. These people either have strong support or opposition to his work — a good sign that Ahmed does something worth noticing. The supporters admire his creativity and assert that he brings carpet-making traditions to a new frontier. The other group shows concern, accusing him of disrespect to ancient carpet weaving traditions.
The frontiers are artificial and Faig Ahmed breaks them, challenging both the contemporary art and carpet worlds. His artwork is innovative in forms, yet the process is rooted in traditions: For centuries little has changed in hand-woven carpet making.
The knotted carpet appeared independently in different cultures. While Gultapin excavations in Azerbaijan revealed the existence of carpet weaving tools as early as the 4th–3rd millennia BC, there are no surviving examples of carpet weaving from that period. Although some authors, insist that the Hermitage Museum’s Pazyryk carpet, dated around the 4th–3rd centuries BC and found in a burial in Altai, was made in the Caucasus, more conservative scholars believe that the earliest surviving examples of the Caucasian carpets belong to the Dragon group. Attributed to the 13th–18th centuries, these carpets were woven in the areas of present-day Karabakh and Kuba in Azerbaijan. The oldest surviving example, heavily damaged by fire during WWII, the
Detail of Signs, 2016
Kutab, 2016
From his studio in Baku, Azerbaijan, Ahmed creates textile works that transcend and transform the history of carpet making in the region. Ahmed is interested in how the contemporary and the traditional collide to create something new that defies genres, borders, and even history. Ahmed and his weaving collaborators infuse new breath into the carpet making practice, turning his textiles into a rich meeting ground between the new and the old, the common and the holy, the rich and the ordinary.
Framed as a “mid-career retrospective,” Collision at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art gathered diverse works from different eras of the artist’s prolific practice. Kutab,
the oldest work in the show, demonstrated the artist’s earlier experimentations with form, technique, and scale. In conversation with Nizami Ganjavi, the most recent included work, Ahmed clearly advances and pushes the medium into new arenas of historical context, use of symbols, and technical approach. Loaned from US-based universities and private and international collections, these works together also demonstrate the near-universal popularity of Ahmed’s practice and his ability to engage communities and transcend cultural and socio-political boundaries. There is something profoundly elevated, and yet deeply accessible about Ahmed’s practice at large, and this collection of works together.
Traditional ceremony within the Oku-Noto Triennale 2023
LIQUID, 2014 / Handmade wool carpet / 200 × 466 cm Jameel Arts Centre | Dubai, UAE
YOU HAVE WINGS, 2016 / Handmade wool carpet / 94 × 154 cm
SET YOUR LIFE ON FIRE, 2016 / Handmade wool carpet / 94 × 158 cm
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