Faig Ahmed’s artistic practice is immediately recognisable in its aesthetic exploration of human consciousness. Hailing from Azerbaijan, he began his investigation of the power of universal symbolism at a young age and from the very foundation of Azerbaijani cultural expression – the traditional handwoven carpet. Carpets in Azerbaijani life are ubiquitous; they adorn public and private spaces as carriers of cultural memory and practice and provide glimpses of the mystical and spiritual underpinnings of society, a mapping of a shared cultural subconscious. Each region in Azerbaijan has its unique patterns and symbology, and the carpets carry historical and social codes embedded within them, linking them across time and geography. As an Azerbaijani who was born during the Soviet Union but who witnessed the independence of his country from the Soviets in 1991, Ahmed is intimately familiar with the potency of carpets as a method of communication. Despite the attempted repression of cultural independence and the appropriation of the Azerbaijani carpet as a tool of Soviet propaganda, the carpet remains a physical representation of the protection and transmission of Azerbaijani identity. It is a site of resistance as much as it is a site of preservation, with the information contained within revealing larger truths and reinforcing shared experience. Using the carpet as a core artistic medium, Ahmed’s artworks explore how this knowledge is shared, transmitted, transmuted and expanded through his manipulation of pattern, form, shape, and perspective.
Ahmed’s early works show his evolving thinking around how a carpet is an object that contains a cultural and social universe, a field upon which to critique our perception and biases. Using the carpet as a totem, patterns are distorted, appear to melt into the floor, dissolve into pixels, or are extruded into space. Commenting on the endurance of traditional practice as a foundational social structure, Ahmed’s carpets interrogate how tradition takes form and shape, and how it both counters and accepts change. From the start of his practice, Ahmed’s technique straddled a line between the digital and physical, with the artist employing technology to help visualize his works as well as a workshop of expert carpet weavers who then transferred his concepts into textile using traditional hand knotting techniques. Ahmed played on this tension between tools and techniques in his works exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of his selection as a shortlisted artist for the Jameel Art Prize 3. In Hollow (2013), the artist digitally warped a corner of the carpet pattern to create a three-dimensional perspective, a technique which he continued to employ for many years and is immediately recognizable as his aesthetic. In Pixelate Tradition (2013), he interrogated how we view shape and form, abstracting carpet patterns into colored pixels as a dual perspective, a tightly zoomed-in view, referencing how carpets are woven, knot by knot, as well as well as how the digital images that we see around us are visually constructed with the same technique through technology. As his practice matured, Ahmed began a process of the deconstruction of the carpet itself, pushing the medium to its limits. In his work 10 [-35] (2016) for his solo exhibition at the Textile Museum of Sweden, the artist elongated the warp of the carpet to create a 10-meter spatial installation. Anchored by the edges of the woven carpet on both ends of the work, it appears to be pulled apart. As the central warp extends and the weft dissipates, the symbols within the carpet pattern are liberated from the central field of the carpet, appearing to float in the filament, released from their context. The move to even larger three-dimensional scales was further explored in his work The Wave (2016), a massive installation of prayer carpets at the MACRO in Rome, Italy, with identical Islamic prayer carpets laid side by side as if in a mosque, peaking as the crest of a wave in the gallery space, reaching towards spiritual union. This work, playing with both two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives, marks a pivotal moment in his career in using carpets as a teleological tool; the carpet is now a portal rather than the message itself.
As his practice evolved, the physical and conceptual limitations of the medium of woven carpets became a challenge for Ahmed, evident in his desire to break and transcend these borders. Alongside his large body of carpet works, Ahmed simultaneously sought to find new ways of understanding how culturally embedded practices and knowledge, along with artistic aesthetics and our internal experience of them, can be communicated and interrogated through his art. Ahmed’s dissatisfaction with the limitations of the carpet as a medium led him to seek new ways to explore the borders of perception beyond the visual. The trajectory of his work to date shows a personal journey from the idea of art as an object – a carrier of information – to art as perception, and the space in-between the artwork and the internal experience of the viewer. It is this impulse, to delve into the deepest layers of human consciousness, that drives his practice forward as he seeks to divine the next stages of the evolution of art itself.
In Ahmed’s view, if art has traditionally been understood through personal perspective as influenced by individual and societal contexts, then art only occurs as an embodied experience. It can be seen as part of a collective moment with others, but ultimately it is a singular act of creation, one done in the reception and interpretation of sensorial data in the brain. How then can conditions around the viewing of art reveal the connections between us? Ahmed identifies the role of the shaman as akin to that of the artist, with the artist acting as a guide in finding patterns and commonalities, and then transforming them through art to resolve conflict and find resolution. This esoteric relationship between the artist and viewer has manifested in his works through a shift from the physical to the performative. The act of stepping away from the participation in the creation of the artwork led Ahmed to break away from the carpet as a physical medium and start to explore how artworks can be made from the viewers themselves, how they can actively perform a part in the manifestation and interpretation of the artwork.
Starting with the work Social Anatomy (2016), Ahmed staged a performance of traditional rites of passage, a social event that physically and symbolically brings the community together to usher an individual from childhood into adulthood. This work, viewed from above as a moving symmetrical carpet of 360 performers, shows the ritualistic actions undertaken and traditional objects used for this rite, both communal and individual, capturing the momentum of this spiritual shift and the role of society in ushering it into being. The performers in the work took on the role of making the concept tangible – their collective act itself creating the artwork under the supervision of the artist. Removing himself even further from the act of creation, Ahmed then staged a series of performance experiments in an empty warehouse using different generations of the same family and their interactions as the medium. These performances, created as an artistic experiment of pure interaction of society sterilized from cultural elements, sought to create a mirror of interpersonal relationships and explore the links between generations expressing the same sentiments through the individuals saying the words of ‘you’ and ‘we’ together as a group, connecting the individual to the collective. In this case, he believes that it is the artist’s duty to feel and communicate the unseen, untold conflicts and values in society, illuminating the deeper constellation of human consciousness. It was this distillation of the human experience that brought Ahmed to where he is now – seeking to create conditions where both participation and perception come together to form what he sees as his new medium: the pure consciousness of the experience of art.
Ahmed cites two works as crucial in shaping his interrogation of art media. In the first, he references Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915) as an iconic symbol of purity in art, embodying both emptiness and potential, and showing the power of context and perception in the interpretation of an artwork, which he believes parallels scientific principles where pure energy can create new materials. Alongside this concept, Marina Abramović's performance The Artist is Present (2009) emphasizes the essence of the artist-audience relationship. Devoid of objects and movement, for Ahmed, Abramović catalysed the possibility of creating art without an object and the generative power of presence, and being present, as the artwork itself. Both works led Ahmed to turn to science as a tool to understand how instead of creating a physical artwork, an artist can instead create the conditions for art to manifest within the viewer. Artistic practice then becomes a laboratory for inquiry and Ahmed seeks to create the scientific conditions to identify an objective understanding art.
A central question for Ahmed is how art, as a human-created phenomenon existing within the human brain, can art be studied through the lens of human consciousness and the body's reactions to art. To start to answer this, Ahmed’s current approach seeks to bridge the gap between subjective artistic experiences and objective scientific inquiry. By using data collection and analysis, his latest works, shown as part of a larger survey exhibition of his recent practice ‘Consciousness in Flux’ at the Maraya Art Centre (17 Feb - 01 Aug 2024), he seeks to use data to reveal patterns in how people perceive and react to art, potentially categorizing artworks based on common reactions, and ultimately creating a comprehensive understanding of art's impact, transcending individual biases. Shifting from the spiritual to the scientific is an impulse that resonates deeply with Ahmed, a natural progression of his overarching practice to find what unites humanity beyond the social, beyond context, and down to our essential being.
In the central work of the exhibition, also titled Consciousness in Flux (2024), a long-duration performance is centered around gathering data from the visitors to his exhibition. He has now taken on the role of the scientist – creating the conditions where the perception of art can be recorded as objectively as possible. Working with a data technician, Ahmed uses a head piece with censors for brain activity along with pulse and temperature monitors to measure and map physiological reactions to art, which can then be aggregated as a data set to potentially understand how the perception of artwork can be analysed through data. In the interaction with the work, he presents a selection of digital images of artworks from various moments and geographies across art history to create a baseline. Viewers then also view carpet artworks from his own practice to layer in their response to contemporary works of art. The carpets in the installation have been selected to represent the tension between traditional motifs and contemporary, with Azerbaijani carpet patterns based on deeply embedded symbolism and knowledge dissolving into more abstracted contemporary forms, colors and shapes. This allows Ahmed to measure responses to both simultaneously, determining to some extent the viewer’s reaction to the familiar and unfamiliar. The initial period of data collection for the project will span a year and different geographies where his work is shown in order to analyse a larger data set and start to determine the skeleton of a pattern, a subconscious language of universal understandings of symbols. Through this, he seeks to identify moments of synthesis between the individuals and the collective in their response to art, dissolving the boundaries between spirituality and science by making the subconscious more evident in the observation of conscious experience.
What then does this mean for the future of Ahmed’s practice and what will be the creative output? Ahmed still sees carpets as a crucial component of his practice. They are the foundation on which he builds his conceptual explorations and will continue to be a method of communication and discourse with the larger existential questions that he is trying to answer through his work. As he seeks further communion with the larger structures of elemental order, the patterns that shape existence, he sees data and mathematics as his tools for identifying and then breaking these constraints. In this, he again returns to the role of the shaman, the spiritual seeker, the interpreter of symbols, but through his methods, aesthetics, and artworks, reveals that human conscious has the power to both make meaning as well as reveal what unites us all.