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.