Public Lecture with Prof. Moridi: Carpet as Cultural Text

This is lecture will be presented live in person and on zoom. Registration required.

 The carpet is a cultural symbol of the East. Carpets are an important cultural heritage for Iran, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern countries. Therefore, Middle Eastern artists have dealt with the carpet as a cultural text and have created contemporary works inspired by its aesthetics, referring to its cultural heritage and appropriating it from its traditional position. Some artists are faced with the issue of how to create a contemporary carpet. In fact, they are facing the bigger question of how can traditional arts be made contemporary? The second group of artists are faced with the issue of how they can use carpets as materials to create contemporary art. For these artists, the carpet is a symbol of traditional culture and even religious ideologies of the Middle East. Therefore, artists from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have turned the carpet into a manifesto of social criticism. In this talk, by referring to some works of contemporary artists (such as Farhad Moshiri, Jalal Sepehr, Behnam Kamrani, Faig Ahmed, Abdullah Syed, Afrooz Amighi, Mona Hatoum, Rashid Rana), we show how carpets become a context to represent the cultural challenges of the Middle East.