FAIG AHMED | DISSOLVING ORDER | AGA KHAN MUSEUM, CANADA

FAIG AHMED | DISSOLVING ORDER | AGA KHAN MUSEUM, CANADA

Faig Ahmed (Sumqayit, 1982) graduated from the Sculpture Department of Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in 2004. He represented Azerbaijan at the nation’s inaugural pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and again in 2013. The artist was nominated for the Jameel Prize 3 at Victoria and Albert Museum. His works are in public collections, including Los Angeles County Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and Palm Springs Museum of Art.

Ahmed’s works have been featured in many important museum group exhibitions, including shows at the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Bellevue Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, and at the Aga Khan Museum, Canada, with his latest exhibits DISSOLVING ORDER | October 31, 2020–March 21, 2021.

The centerpiece of Dissolving Order is a deconstruction of one of the world’s most enduring, remarkably consistent art forms: the carpet. Like many of Ahmed’s sculptures, Gautama (2017), a hand-woven carpet itself, distorts familiar features of carpets, warping the past into something otherworldly and new.

Gautama appears to fray, swirl, and ooze right in front of the viewer — a helpful reminder that long-lasting traditions or established systems can shapeshift at any time. Everything seems in flux, and at the same time, we see new horizons and fresh, expressive possibilities materialize right before our eyes.

FAIG AHMED

Faig Ahmed (Sumqayit, 1982) lives and works in Baku, Azerbaijan, and graduated from Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art’s sculpture department in 2004.
He represented Azerbaijan at the nation’s inaugural pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and participated in the show “Love Me, Love Me Not” in 2013.
He is well known for his conceptual works that utilize traditional decorative craft and carpets’ visual language into contemporary sculptural works of art. His art reimagines ancient crafts and creates new visual boundaries by deconstructing traditions and stereotypes.
Ahmed is among a new wave of contemporary artists exploring crafts in innovative ways to produce conceptual works that break away from conventions associated with the craft by bringing it into a global contemporary art context. Ahmed explores fresh new visual forms that examine tradition and challenge our perception of traditions through iconic cultural objects.
The artist experiments with traditional materials and colors such as the rug weavings in Azerbaijan or Indian embroidery, yet he explains that “he is not interested in merging the past and present,” but is interested “in the past because it’s the most stable conception of our lives.” Among his art historical inspirations, Ahmed lists Hieronymus Bosch and Otto Dix; he admires James Turrell and Anish Kapoor among his contemporaries.

Ahmed’s works in a broad range of mediums, as demonstrated in his intricate installations “Embroidery Space,” 2012 (silk threads) and “Disassembled,” 2013 (handmade wool carpet and mixed media), and his work “Birds,” 2011 (in mixed media). All of these works show the artist’s contemporary concepts visualized in various mediums. In addition, Ahmed’s artworks engage the viewers through its unexpected marriage of traditional crafts, steeped in history, with hyper-contemporary, digitally distorted images often in the form of pixilation, three-dimensional shapes and melting paint that alters the pattern on the rugs.
He employs computers to sketch his works and chooses intricate traditional methods of carpet-weaving techniques to printing his designs on carpets. In his work “Oiling” 2012, in the collection of Seattle Art Museum, his hand-woven carpet designs transform and appear as though the pigments in the rug are melting into a wavy pattern of oil on water.
The artist’s deep interests and avenues of personal inquiry are connected to world religions, mystical practices, ancient scripture, calligraphy, and patterns. In the introduction to his first major European solo show, “Points of Perception” at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, the curator for the exhibition, Claudio Libero Pisano states that the artist “deals with the question concerning the perception of truth” and creation of.”
He describes Ahmed’s aesthetic as “daring and futuristic,” and yet “faithful to ancient methods.”

Linda Komaroff, Curator of Islamic Art and Head of Middle Eastern Art, at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art wrote:
“Although Faig Ahmed works in other mediums–painting, video, and installation, he is best known for his fantastical woven pieces based on the classical Azerbaijani carpet, which is a cornerstone of the artist’s cultural heritage… Today, Ahmed carries on this artistic tradition but not with ink and paper; instead, he remakes his carpet designs on a computer, generating optical illusions that transform the finished work into something entirely contemporary, which can express a three-dimensional or even kinetic quality.”

OCTOBER 31, 2020–MARCH 21, 2021
Website: agakhanmuseum.org

Read the full article on Art Market Magazine Issue #53