Faig Ahmed: Switching The Carpet

“Any action without a goal is art.”(Faig Ahmed). At first glance, you will assume that these rugs are photoshopped. But these astonishing handmade rugs are actually woven by the emerging artist, Faig Ahmed. In his creations, Faig explores composition of a traditional Azerbaijanian carpet by disjointing its structure and placing its canonic elements into open space. “Carpet is more a time structure than a graphical one. Initially it was considered as a sophisticated sort of writing rather than a mere decorative piece.” Faig separates time and space by switching the carpet from two-dimensional plane to three-dimensional space where it comes to life. Basically the artist trenches upon a sancta sanctorum of Azerbaijanian carpet-making tradition. But being a modern-day version of a God’s fool the artist easily gets away with it. With this technique the artist translates traditional carpet language into universal language of contemporary art, making it understandable for the rest of the people. “I’ve been always fond of investigating and researching every detail of anything that had interested me and sometimes this researches reached inconceivable depths mixing up with my imagination. I’m heretofore harried by a question others have left in childhood – “what is inside?”. That’s why I’m changing habitual and visually static objects making them spatial, giving them a new depth. And this as if reveals the essence of this object – the object that was mediocre just a minute ago.“ Faig Ahmed was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1982. He studied at the Azerbaijan State Fine Art Academy, with a Sculpture Bachelor degree, and is currently a Board member of YARAT. He currently lives and works in Baku.