saparcontemporary.viewingrooms.com: La Biennale di Venezia – the Republic of Azerbaijan

On the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, the Republic of Azerbaijan presents The Attention, a solo exhibition of new commissions by Faig Ahmed, curated by Gwendolyn Collaço. Known for his surreal textile interventions that disrupt and reconfigure traditional carpet-making, Ahmed presents a new body of large-scale, site-specific works that position craft within a broader inquiry into perception, cognition, and contemporary experience. At the center of the exhibition is the carpet, reimagined as a coded surface—an inscriptional field in which threads, patterns, and structures operate as a language through which meaning is constructed and continually reinterpreted.

The project draws on the philosophical and poetic legacy of Imadaddin Nasimi and the Hurufi mystic tradition, which understood the universe as an encoded system of letters, numbers, and signs. In this worldview, alphanumeric structures form a “metalanguage” through which all entities—human, material, and cosmic—are interconnected. Bringing this framework into dialogue with contemporary physics, Ahmed proposes a continuity between premodern metaphysics and quantum models of reality, where both science and mysticism describe a world that is probabilistic, relational, and constantly unfolding through interpretation and attention. Moving beyond the perceived divide between order and chaos, the exhibition suggests that scientific and poetic systems operate in tandem, shaping human consciousness and our understanding of reality.

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