Faig

On the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, the Republic of Azerbaijan presents The Attention, a solo exhibition of new commissions by Faig Ahmed, curated by Gwendolyn Collaço. Known for his surreal textile interventions that disrupt and reconfigure traditional carpet-making, Ahmed presents a new body of large-scale, site-specific works that position craft within a broader inquiry into perception, cognition, and contemporary experience. At the center of the exhibition is the carpet, reimagined as a coded surface—an inscriptional field in which threads, patterns, and structures operate as a language through which meaning is constructed and continually reinterpreted. The project draws on the philosophical and poetic legacy of Imadaddin Nasimi and the Hurufi mystic tradition, which understood the universe as an encoded system of letters, numbers, and signs. In this worldview, alphanumeric structures form a “metalanguage” through which all entities—human, material, and cosmic—are interconnected. Bringing this framework into dialogue with contemporary physics, Ahmed proposes a continuity between premodern metaphysics and quantum models of reality, where both science and mysticism describe a world that is probabilistic, relational, and constantly unfolding through interpretation and attention. Moving beyond the perceived divide between order and chaos, the exhibition suggests that scientific and poetic systems operate in tandem, shaping human consciousness and our understanding of reality.

Faig Ahmed’s sculptural textile works are rooted in West and Central Asian art histories and literary poetic traditions, which draw on the transmedial relationship between text and image, mystical writing, and mathematical compositions. Each work encodes a range of transnational references to local communities across Azerbaijan, Iran, and the broader region; however, Ahmed’s warping of each carpet establishes each work beyond its historical patterning and invites the viewer to engage with the carpet as an experiential work of art. The formal aspects of carpet-making, including the repetitive and invisible labor of weaving knots are rendered visible through a distortion of scale that foregrounds the knot as a singular and integral structural form. Ahmed’s sculptural rugs are attuned to the intermedial quality of carpets and the stories they tell, but rather than reproducing them as whole, it is through the artist’s conceptual act of unraveling that the carpet reveals its mystical dimensions. For Ahmed, the carpet is neither an object of ornament nor is it merely a surface pattern. The carpet contains references to diverse practices, ideas, and stories, while also functioning itself as a medium.

— Donna Honarpisheh, Associate Curator of Knight Art and Research, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami