March 28—August 2, 2026
TEXTILES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Curated by Monica Huerta and Ava Shirazi
Art@Bainbridge, Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ, USA
Art@Bainbridge, Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ, USA
FAIG AHMED: TEXTILES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Monica Huerta and Ava Shirazi
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation.
Faig Ahmed's works are monumental in scale. For that reason, they are often shown in cavernous galleries where visitors can witness the work from a distance, with awe. In Bainbridge House, Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to experience Faig's work up close and to let your senses lead.
Faig was trained in sculpture. His works blend Azerbaijani textile techniques with what he calls a "hyper-contemporary," digitally distorted and pixelated aesthetic. Faig's process begins with sketches on paper that he further develops with computer renditions. He then turns to the loom, selecting traditional techniques of carpet weaving alongside a team of Azerbaijani women weavers, whose practices reach back centuries. What emerges through Faig's experiments with the visual and material language of carpets is a group of works that confound expectations of craft-based textiles.
Textiles of Consciousness refers both to Faig's works and to his spiritual study of consciousness through Sufi and other ancient sacred traditions. The exhibition in Bainbridge House offers the opportunity for close encounters with Faig's conceptual interests, ranging from ritual and social reproduction to his more recent, extensive study of aesthetic perception with neuroscience tools such as EEGs and eye-tracking programs.
This exhibition moves beyond the meeting ground for historical practices and contemporary digital aesthetics inherent in Faig's textiles. The show is an invitation to feel—not just to think about—how his works blur the boundaries between sensation and perception. We invite you to take the time to experience this slippage between perceiving the meanings of the textiles' myths, poetry, patterns, and symbolisms and sensing the works in a fully embodied way.
Faig Ahmed's works are monumental in scale. For that reason, they are often shown in cavernous galleries where visitors can witness the work from a distance, with awe. In Bainbridge House, Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to experience Faig's work up close and to let your senses lead.
Faig was trained in sculpture. His works blend Azerbaijani textile techniques with what he calls a "hyper-contemporary," digitally distorted and pixelated aesthetic. Faig's process begins with sketches on paper that he further develops with computer renditions. He then turns to the loom, selecting traditional techniques of carpet weaving alongside a team of Azerbaijani women weavers, whose practices reach back centuries. What emerges through Faig's experiments with the visual and material language of carpets is a group of works that confound expectations of craft-based textiles.
Textiles of Consciousness refers both to Faig's works and to his spiritual study of consciousness through Sufi and other ancient sacred traditions. The exhibition in Bainbridge House offers the opportunity for close encounters with Faig's conceptual interests, ranging from ritual and social reproduction to his more recent, extensive study of aesthetic perception with neuroscience tools such as EEGs and eye-tracking programs.
This exhibition moves beyond the meeting ground for historical practices and contemporary digital aesthetics inherent in Faig's textiles. The show is an invitation to feel—not just to think about—how his works blur the boundaries between sensation and perception. We invite you to take the time to experience this slippage between perceiving the meanings of the textiles' myths, poetry, patterns, and symbolisms and sensing the works in a fully embodied way.
GALLERY 1. PULSE
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to descend sensorially, as though to the level of your own pulse.
Faig tells a story about a childhood impulse to cut up and rearrange the patterns of his grandmother's 150-year-old rug. Big Emptiness greets and mesmerizes with its internal amplification of patterns. It's hard to look at Big Emptiness and not feel a little disoriented. Works that evoke this feeling tend to be characterized as optical illusions, but because Big Emptiness is a textile, its effect of descending steps contains a haptic register—a visual pulse.
Social Anatomy corresponds to Faig's interest in ritual practices that reproduce gender and social relations in Azerbaijan. The video animates Azerbaijani textile patterns through the soundless performance of movements and gestures associated with weddings and funerals. Together, Social Anatomy and Big Emptiness recall Faig's first rearrangement of his grandmother's rug: This childhood play eventually led to his experiments with performance and ritual as well as his newer work on aesthetic perception.
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to descend sensorially, as though to the level of your own pulse.
Faig tells a story about a childhood impulse to cut up and rearrange the patterns of his grandmother's 150-year-old rug. Big Emptiness greets and mesmerizes with its internal amplification of patterns. It's hard to look at Big Emptiness and not feel a little disoriented. Works that evoke this feeling tend to be characterized as optical illusions, but because Big Emptiness is a textile, its effect of descending steps contains a haptic register—a visual pulse.
Social Anatomy corresponds to Faig's interest in ritual practices that reproduce gender and social relations in Azerbaijan. The video animates Azerbaijani textile patterns through the soundless performance of movements and gestures associated with weddings and funerals. Together, Social Anatomy and Big Emptiness recall Faig's first rearrangement of his grandmother's rug: This childhood play eventually led to his experiments with performance and ritual as well as his newer work on aesthetic perception.
GALLERY 2. GLITCH
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to reimagine glitches.
While the first gallery introduces viewers to Faig's animation of traditional textiles, Gallery 2 brings us to his team's active neuroscience research on aesthetic perception and to Faig's sketch work as part of his artistic process.
In general, one might associate glitches with digital cultures. But weaving is inherently a binary art—digital aesthetics already exist in the design maps of weavers, who think and feel through patterns dot by dot. If weaving is already a pixelated form of making, then there's space for disruption and the potential for glitches.
With The Knot and Kutab, Faig integrates traditional patterns with glitch effects. The woven glitches are not signs of malfunction; instead they hold conceptual, narrative, and textural energy. Kutab, one of Faig's earliest works, experiments with the boundaries of form. The work opens, almost like a book, putting the digital map on display and foregrounding the potential of distortion, of glitch, as a form of expansion. With both Kutab and The Knot, Faig shows that textiles are not bound to their patterns but can offer infinite formations by embracing the glitch.
Gallery 2 also debuts a new textile series, Collective Pattern, and a documentary produced for this exhibition. The works in Collective Pattern are products of Faig's ongoing neuroscience research on aesthetic perception, undertaken in collaboration with the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum. Faig selected forty-three rugs from their collection. Using EEGs—a test that records electrical activity in the brain—and eye-tracking tools, Faig and his team captured participants' sensory and perceptual interactions with these carpets. The new works on display in Bainbridge House are material translations of this collected data.
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to reimagine glitches.
While the first gallery introduces viewers to Faig's animation of traditional textiles, Gallery 2 brings us to his team's active neuroscience research on aesthetic perception and to Faig's sketch work as part of his artistic process.
In general, one might associate glitches with digital cultures. But weaving is inherently a binary art—digital aesthetics already exist in the design maps of weavers, who think and feel through patterns dot by dot. If weaving is already a pixelated form of making, then there's space for disruption and the potential for glitches.
With The Knot and Kutab, Faig integrates traditional patterns with glitch effects. The woven glitches are not signs of malfunction; instead they hold conceptual, narrative, and textural energy. Kutab, one of Faig's earliest works, experiments with the boundaries of form. The work opens, almost like a book, putting the digital map on display and foregrounding the potential of distortion, of glitch, as a form of expansion. With both Kutab and The Knot, Faig shows that textiles are not bound to their patterns but can offer infinite formations by embracing the glitch.
Gallery 2 also debuts a new textile series, Collective Pattern, and a documentary produced for this exhibition. The works in Collective Pattern are products of Faig's ongoing neuroscience research on aesthetic perception, undertaken in collaboration with the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum. Faig selected forty-three rugs from their collection. Using EEGs—a test that records electrical activity in the brain—and eye-tracking tools, Faig and his team captured participants' sensory and perceptual interactions with these carpets. The new works on display in Bainbridge House are material translations of this collected data.
Faig often talks about his work as an interplay of observation and creation. As with the cultural and ritual traditions that influence his practice, in this new work viewers' perception becomes another collective pattern for the artist's visual experiments. For Faig, it is important that visitors become co-creators. He translates viewers' attention and neurological activation into knots-as-pixels that are then layered into the textiles. The works in this gallery show the way Faig is reimagining how we approach collective consciousness as a phenomenon in relation to the material world. Through these works' multiplying sensory effects, we can reencounter traditions of weavers and social relations lived out with rugs.
GALLERY 3. DRIP
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to let an imaginary gravitational force move through you as it does through the works.
In Gallery 3, Catalysis reinterprets visual motifs such as medallions, stylized flowers, stems, leaves, and geometric shapes that are typically woven into Azerbaijani textiles.
Yet—seemingly acted on by an imaginary gravitational force—Catalysis transmutes these patterns as if spools of raw thread were spilling onto the gallery floor.
Singularity AP's geometric patterns spread, stretch, and drip in simulated flow. Distinct from the patterns of Catalysis, which drip down in a single direction, Singularity AP's distortion emerges from its center. Thread becomes a liquid covering the wall, exerting a new force on the traditional patterns.
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to let an imaginary gravitational force move through you as it does through the works.
In Gallery 3, Catalysis reinterprets visual motifs such as medallions, stylized flowers, stems, leaves, and geometric shapes that are typically woven into Azerbaijani textiles.
Yet—seemingly acted on by an imaginary gravitational force—Catalysis transmutes these patterns as if spools of raw thread were spilling onto the gallery floor.
Singularity AP's geometric patterns spread, stretch, and drip in simulated flow. Distinct from the patterns of Catalysis, which drip down in a single direction, Singularity AP's distortion emerges from its center. Thread becomes a liquid covering the wall, exerting a new force on the traditional patterns.
GALLERY 4. FLUFF
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to experience the sensory prehistory of the rug.
In Speech of the Birds and Virgin, bundles of thread erupt into elegant fluff. With PULSE in Gallery 1, we began with consciousness experienced as an embodied process. In FLUFF, we cascade into a collective sensory prehistory of the rug.
Faig understands the borders, patterns, and symbolism in textiles as analogous to social structure. Allowing these structures to pulse, glitch, drip, and fluff, he encourages viewers to experience social shifts, connecting our embedded sensory experiences and modes of perceiving to social patterning. The overall effect is one in which the patterns—visual forms of storytelling passed from one generation to another—pull our senses into them. As our senses become affected by the work, we allow the textiles' speculative threads and visceral knots to change our consciousness.
Textiles of Consciousness is an invitation to experience the sensory prehistory of the rug.
In Speech of the Birds and Virgin, bundles of thread erupt into elegant fluff. With PULSE in Gallery 1, we began with consciousness experienced as an embodied process. In FLUFF, we cascade into a collective sensory prehistory of the rug.
Faig understands the borders, patterns, and symbolism in textiles as analogous to social structure. Allowing these structures to pulse, glitch, drip, and fluff, he encourages viewers to experience social shifts, connecting our embedded sensory experiences and modes of perceiving to social patterning. The overall effect is one in which the patterns—visual forms of storytelling passed from one generation to another—pull our senses into them. As our senses become affected by the work, we allow the textiles' speculative threads and visceral knots to change our consciousness.