Interview 3. Faig Ahmed: Rethinking the Concept of Azeri Pile Carpets as Art, Azerbaijan

摘要

Perhaps it is because Faig Ahmed originally graduated from the Sculpture Department of Azerbaijan's State Academy of Fine Art in 2004 that he was able to conceive of his carpet exhibits as 3D representations. His work has been well recognised with group and solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Dubai, Dubai, Rome Moscow and the UAE. He was nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has also recently exhibited in several museum groups in the USA. I knew nothing of that when I first saw one of the photos of his exhibition about carpets (Figure 1); It stood there alone on Facebook and was a very powerful image for me in several ways. It was so totally different; it combined traditional and contemporary representations of Azeri/Persian carpets. It was startling, it was challenging, it showed a completely different way of thinking about carpets-somehow as an object that could liquify and change shape (Figure 2). What first fascinated me were the actual images but when I showed them to other textile colleagues, the question we all asked is how did he do that? Surely, they cannot be woven into such liquid and unusual shapes? But they were.