Faig Ahmed that appears to melt from the wall onto the floor.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’An installation view of “Illuminated Threads: Contemporary and Traditional Rugs” is at the Birmingham Museum of Art. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy the Birmingham Museum of Art</span>’>
It feels remarkably apt that an exhibition of rugs from the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region is staged in a gallery space that loosely echoes a mihrab—the architectural niche in mosques that points toward Mecca, the direction of Muslim prayer. “Illuminated Threads,” a permanent collection exhibition organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art, unfolds within three walls that frame a shallow recess off a larger processional corridor. This spatial arrangement lends the prayer rugs an immediate sense of sanctity and realness, inviting the viewer to trust that what is being seen is authentic—yet that trust begins to unravel under closer scrutiny.
Flanking the gallery space are seven rugs from the Republic of Dagestan, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and the Caucasus region, dating from the 19th and 20th centuries. Though produced in distinct cultural and geographic contexts, the rugs are unified by a shared synthesis of Islamic faith and regional traditions. Many feature recurring visual motifs such as mihrabs and fanoos—lanterns traditionally used during Ramadan and Eid—asserting their function as devotional objects, textiles made for and imbued with reverence. Displayed in sequence, the diversity of form and origin is a testament to Islam’s expansive geographic reach and cultural influence. Among them, the most arresting is KumKapi Rug with Mihrab, Glass Lamps, and Floral Motifs (c. 1910), woven from dyed silk, dyed cotton and metallic thread. It gleams under the gallery lighting, with calligraphic writing curling across its surface in radiant gold.
This procession is interrupted by Shirvanshah (2024) by Faig Ahmed. Running from the wall onto the floor, the rug’s patterning and design emulate the historical examples surrounding it, although in Ahmed’s, the weaving is distorted so that it appears to drip and ooze down the wall and run out into the gallery—a surreal manipulation of the textile that emphasizes its sculptural characteristics. The placement of one contemporary artwork among a slew of devotional prayer objects feels discordant: a jarring departure from the pious nature of the historical rugs. The central placement and comparative largeness of Ahmed’s rugs in the gallery mean it is impossible to escape its constant influence—a chillingly authoritarian curatorial decision. I felt myself constantly looking back to it as I viewed the other artworks. This feeling is not assuaged, but it is contextualized by the distortion found in Ahmed’s work.
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Living in the “post-truth” era is to live in a time where history is the subject of constant speculation. Many contemporary endeavors use history as a site for optimistic expansions, i.e., a widening of the canon by uplifting underserved demographics. But this speculative research can also be nefarious. Does carrying forward a historical tradition and contextualizing it in a contemporary moment always lead to a net positive? This exhibition seems to say otherwise.
The moment of reverence I felt drawn to within the devotional rugs was constantly unnerved by the distorted view of history present in Ahmed’s rug, which further serves as a reminder that any view of history will be distorted. Much like projections of the globe onto a two-dimensional plane, it is impossible to present all aspects of the earth in an unbiased way. The key, then, is to acknowledge these distortions and to choose the one that can be used for the most good.
It is notable that the portion of Shirvanshah that runs along the ground toward the viewer is unmanipulated. Taken on its own, it would pass as a prayer rug in its own right. It is only the section hanging from the wall that is nearly unrecognizable. With this, Ahmed—who represented Azerbaijan at the 2007 Venice Biennale—offers space for pious practice but creates a dissonance toward that which the person is praying. In that, Shirvanshah argues for the maintenance of religious practices alongside constant questioning of those in whom we place our trust.
“Illuminated Threads: Contemporary and Traditional Rugs” is at the Birmingham Museum of Art through April 13, 2025.
