Faig Ahmed is known for his vibrant textile sculptures that take traditional Azerbaijani ornamental carpets as starting point, often appearing to melt, pool, or glitch. In his current solo presentation at the 61st Venice Biennale, where he is representing Azerbaijan, the Baku-based artist branches out into more conceptual territory, exploring science, alchemy, spirituality, and perceptions of self in a sprawling, maze-like installation called The Attention.
Curated by Gwendolyn Collaço, the exhibition expands upon Ahmed’s interest in the dialectic between digital processes and time-honored, hand-crafted techniques. The artist considers how advanced scientific inquiry, such as quantum physics and neuroscience, relates to how we “articulate cosmologies of belonging,” says a statement.
Ornamental carpets continue as a through-line in The Attention, undulating, scrunching, distending, and balling up through a series of rooms. They even extend outdoors, creating a kind of continuous runner that spills out of doorways and stretches into long lines of color.
“Ahmed bridges the 15th-century Hurufi mystic tradition—which viewed the universe as a coded text—with modern information theory,” says a statement. “By channeling the ‘human energy’ of the weave, he uses this ancient textile paradigm to address our era’s information overload and collective grief.”
Ahmed taps into a theoretical framework coined by physicist John Wheeler that can be summed up, rather enigmatically, as “it from bit.” It’s a short way of describing an approach to information theory that string theorists and quantum mechanics researchers have tested. In other words, “…every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.”
In The Attention, the binaries of “it from bit” are not only present in the way digital methods and the physical labor of the loom converge but also in Ahmed’s interests.
“I have always been drawn to exploring consciousness for as far back as I can remember,” he says in a statement, continuing:
This search has guided my attention in two directions: on one hand, toward science—biology, physics, and mathematics—and on the other, toward spirituality, art, poetry, and creative expression. At first glance, these fields appear opposite, even contradictory. One form of knowledge is directed out-ward, toward what can be measured, calculated, observed, and verified. The other turns inward, toward the subjective, the unprovable, and the inexpressible. It is an experience that cannot be confirmed or fully shared with another, just as it is impossible to truly know what it feels like to be someone else.
Merging 15th-century Hurufi mysticism with science, digital interfaces with the analog, and introspective personal experiences with objective data, Ahmed’s carpets guide visitors through the immersive space. The largest one, a monumental machine-woven piece, is titled “I Can Contain Both Worlds But I Do Not Fit Into This One.” It forms what the artist describes as a “breathing body” that climbs the architecture, knots itself, collapses, and spills. “Ancestors,” a faintly anthropomorphic wall piece that glows psychedelically in black light is woven by hand. And a work called “Entropy Altar” uses a quantum random number generator to translate visitor presence into an evolving language.
The Attention remains on view through November 22 at Campo della Tana, Castello 2124/A–2125, Venice. See more on Ahmed’s Instagram and Vimeo.
