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HELICOPTERS,
TANKS, PORTRAITS, FLAGS AND MAPS: Exhibition Dates Gallery Hours in collaboration with Kevin Sudeith and warrug.com's Project Empowerment |
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Jennifer and Filippo Fossati wishing you a great new year, are pleased to present a show of textiles from Afghanistan that will open this year's exhibition season on January 22, 2005. For a series of coincidences, which already had the mark of Boetti's hand, we came across an unusual series of rugs made in Afghanistan from the collection of Kevin Sudeith. We had already seen war rugs, especially those made during the Soviet occupation but what immediately caught our attention was a group of textiles made during the American invasion depicting maps of the world on backgrounds of brilliant colors, framed by a decoration of flags and English writing. Having already confessed our long time love for the works by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, to whom we dedicated two shows in 1997 and in 1999, the connection was too obvious. Boetti had his embroideries and rugs made in Afghanistan in the early 70s and then in Pakistan, where his weavers escaped to. The provenance of these previously unknown rugs, and more importantly the imagery woven in was incredibly close to Boetti's. We knew, of course, because Boetti himself had already mentioned it in 1992, of the existence of rugs sold as "Boetti style", and that with such a name attached to them it was a way of selling rugs in the western hemisphere; we would never have thought that Alighiero's lesson could have been taken so literally. We couldn't imagine the scale that the influence of a single western artist could have on an entire eastern culture. To us, the discovery of these textiles is the demonstration that art has longer perspectives in time and history then any other way of communication and that the peaceful practices and ideas of Alighiero Boetti are still traveling and floating alive in the air and on the ground handed on in the form of a rug. "... An anecdote: in Peshawar
there are a million Afghan refugees. Among them, various artisans
are making rugs in a new style, with helicopters, containers,
western words, etc... An Afghan man who lives in Milan and sells
these kind of rugs, speaks about them as belonging to a "Boetti
style" that has been imposed in Afghanistan! Therefore,
a person from Turin like me, that travels to the center of Asia
and arrives to have an influence on a millenary tradition...
It's enough of a reason to stop" (1.) The craft-work and colors undoubtedly
possess their fascination and in part may also be the reason
why an innovative conceptual artist such as Alighiero Boetti
set foot in Kabul for the first time in the spring of 1971. He
was a young talented artist who's work had been part of a group
of artists, several of whom based in Turin, that a young critic
from Genoa, Germano Celant, had begun to call Arte Povera. The
city of Turin seemed to be too small for Alighiero and, in addiction,
he loved to travel. The practice of collaboration
was an interest shared by the Arte Povera group breaking down
barriers between author and audience through public participation
in acts of creation. Through his collaborators Boetti was letting
in marginalized women with a completely different cultural background.
Asking that the embroiderers use all available colors in equal
quantity, he left the choice of color composition to the women
themselves, using the tradition of embroidery to address an idea
of collective knowledge. His openness to interpretation, on the
part of his assistants, was always part of his intention. From Boetti's embroidery "Nella primavera dell'anno millenovecentoottantanove" (In the Spring of the Year Nineteen-Eighty-Nine) translated from Farsi writing "Embroidered by Alighiero Boetti with help from Comrade Shah-Vali Afghani, resident of Peshawar, Pakistan. Our dear homeland, Afghanistan, has not only very pleasant weather but also large mines and all sorts of wonderful fruit. Except for now, because bombardments and gunfire of the Russian infidels, its beautiful landscapes are destroyed and its pleasant weather is poisoned by the application of dangerous gases. The Russians are plundering its oil and gas resources and taking away its agricultural products." Boetti's participation in the events that marked history in Afghanistan and Pakistan was close and direct until he died in Rome in 1994. Today we can say that not only his work has obviously survived him but after the American invasion of Afghanistan, we are witnessing another change of course in the imagery of Afghani rug making, thanks also to his example. There are signs of the growing sophistication and expertise of the weavers and if you look more closely, you will notice that those war motifs: tanks, paisley-shaped helicopters, jets, hand grenades and AK47 rifles are making room to glimpse of that damaged, but still tremendously resilient and important country of Afghanistan. Unveiled nomad women lead convoys of camels carrying their children across the desert. There are mountains, monuments and gardens to document and save. These magic carpets do not whisk us away to distant lands, they bring those lands to us, like woolly postcards from another world, complete with maps to assist in our orientation. Not far conceptually from what Bellotto did of Dresden in his paintings. "...What is extraordinary (in Afghanistan) is the value that images take up in such societies; the photograph of a garden, found in a copy of Time, will be cut out and framed with tape, under a sheet of glass..." (4.) About the Maps of the World, Alighiero said in an interview: "I did nothing for this work, chose nothing myself, in the sense that the world is shaped as it is I did not draw it; the flags are what they are I did not design them. In short, I created absolutely nothing". Giambattista Salerno states that "For sure he wasn't the one who had invented the shape of seas and continents, not even their cartographic projection; he certainly had not invented the borders between states, nor the colors and designs of the flags, even less the technique and the symbology of tapestry. So this man made a picture without inventing anything, which is already a folly, and now some descendant or assistant of some weaver who came across Boetti's work is using the same language but what can the result be? Look at it, it is the Map, there is nothing more sumptuous; the most beautiful invention in the world is inventing the world as it is, without inventing anything. This is certainly not a new concept, nor is it one unknown to contemporary art. In the very etymology of the word 'invention', one finds the prefix of repetition; 'invenire' in Latin, 'rinvenire' in Italian - 'découvrir' in French; it means to find or to discover, to find again something that already exists (to recall, for Boetti, is to 'tune the strings of the past')." Notes: esso Gallery |
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