Jacquard-woven cotton tapestry, 300 × 175 cm, created in collaboration with TextielLab, Tilburg, commissioned by Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, for Carpetland. Critical Tapestries.
It is said that the Garden of Eden was sited in the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, more than 5,000 years ago. In these marshes the Marsh Arabs weave carpets unlike any other textile tradition in the Middle East: flowers, animals, human figures, symbols and geometric motifs embroidered with wool yarn on a hand-knotted ground. The long history of this weaving has been almost completely erased by the country’s colonial, patriarchal and dictatorial past.
In non-Western contexts carpets aren’t simply a delimitation of a space or a decoration; their function is equally holistic and spiritual. Through my own displacement and migration from Iraq to Antwerp, carpets became a spatial representation of my Arab identity, and researching Southern Iraqi carpets a way to counter the dominance of Western ‘universal design’.
In Garden of Eden, philosophies associated with these carpets are explored as ways of making. The multi-centred perspective of the weaver: everything shown from many viewpoints at once, with no hierarchy and no simulation of depth, a space that does not face the viewer but surrounds them, not observation but participation. The carpet as a reflection on one’s own locality, a visual subjective map in which reeds, water buffalo and fish carry the life around the rivers, whose flow returns in the texture and the patterns. Geometric ornament and arabesque symmetry, shared by Iraqi material culture and Islamic art. And the pixel, one grid for the knot and the screen, embracing vital connections between old and new.
In non-Western contexts carpets aren’t simply a delimitation of a space or a decoration; their function is equally holistic and spiritual. Through my own displacement and migration from Iraq to Antwerp, carpets became a spatial representation of my Arab identity, and researching Southern Iraqi carpets a way to counter the dominance of Western ‘universal design’.
In Garden of Eden, philosophies associated with these carpets are explored as ways of making. The multi-centred perspective of the weaver: everything shown from many viewpoints at once, with no hierarchy and no simulation of depth, a space that does not face the viewer but surrounds them, not observation but participation. The carpet as a reflection on one’s own locality, a visual subjective map in which reeds, water buffalo and fish carry the life around the rivers, whose flow returns in the texture and the patterns. Geometric ornament and arabesque symmetry, shared by Iraqi material culture and Islamic art. And the pixel, one grid for the knot and the screen, embracing vital connections between old and new.