An Invitation to Faig Ahmed’s Process in Textiles of Consciousness

Faig Ahmed’s sculptural textile works, often monumental in scale, welcome visitors to Art@Bainbridge with the pleasure of textural overwhelm. This intimate encounter has been made possible by the small scale of Bainbridge House, where the exhibition Faig Ahmed: Textiles of Consciousness is on view through August 2.

Faig Ahmed is an internationally celebrated Azerbaijani artist based in Baku. His work has been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions. Trained in sculpture, Faig represented Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and is honored this year as the country’s pavilion artist. His body of work includes large-scale pieces that blend traditional media with what he calls a hyper-contemporary, digitally distorted, and pixelated aesthetic. Faig’s process begins with sketches on paper that he develops through computer renditions. He then turns to the loom and to traditional techniques of carpet weaving alongside a team of Azerbaijani women weavers, whose practices reach back centuries. What emerges through Faig’s experiments with the visual and material language of carpets are works that confound expectations of craft-based textiles. They pull at the body in visceral ways. They invite meditation on the questions that emerge when abstraction meets manipulation. 

Textiles of Consciousness is first and foremost an invitation. This title refers both to Faig’s works and to his spiritual study of consciousness through Sufi and other ancient sacred traditions. Just as mysticism is an invitation to relearn being in the world, the exhibition invites participants to relearn being with art. Each of the four galleries in Bainbridge House corresponds to an aspect of sensory experience that arises when encountering Ahmed’s works: pulse, glitch, drip, and fluff. With these designations, we invite viewers to hold their desire to discover prescribed meaning in abeyance. Instead, we ask that viewers go slowly and suspend their practiced modes of looking at art and, instead, let all their senses lead them into the works, so to speak. 

Early in Faig’s career, rugs became the medium through which the artist asked questions about social rituals, abstracted meaning, and the outer limits of cognition and perception. When he explains this work, he uses the frame of a “visual language” of carpets to describe the grounds of his manipulation of inherited forms. Playing with these traditional visual forms is how Faig asks questions about the material and social relations that shape our collective consciousness. Given the plastic relationship between cognition and language—one shapes the other and is shaped by it in turn—it seems fitting that Faig has expanded his practice by experimenting with neuroscience tools. 

The exhibition at Art@Bainbridge debuts Faig’s new textile series Collective Pattern. Over the course of five years, Faig and his team conducted a sustained study of aesthetic perception using electroencephalogram technology (EEG) and eye-tracking tools in partnership with the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum. The museum’s curatorial team helped select forty-three rugs from its collection for participants to experience. Participants made their way through this group of textiles wearing EEG and eye-tracking devices, while Faig and his team collected the resulting data. This recent collaboration is featured in a new documentary produced for Textiles of Consciousness alongside the first public visualization of this process. In Collective Pattern, three rugs are overlaid not with Faig’s internal structural disruption of traditional patterns but with visualized data from this research made into dynamic concentrations of fluorescent colors that are reminiscent of heat maps. Each color corresponds to categories derived from questionnaires participants filled out as part of this process. And each rug is the result of sorting through and layering participants’ collected data through three categories: Gender, Generation, and Genesis.

In neuroscience research, EEG visualizations are, of course, used as data. Faig’s repurposing of these visualizations, however, emphasizes that they are another form of visual language. Put another way, from a humanistic perspective, EEG here becomes a form of mediation. “Mediation” refers to the fact that what is being represented—in this case, cognitive function—is shaped by the medium through which it is being represented. In a basic sense, it’s helpful to think about mediation as a form of translation. As electrical charges hopscotch across our brain’s synapses, EEG translates this activity through small metal disks placed on the head, often distributed across a mesh cap. These disks are attached to wires linked to a computer screen that then translates the received signals into digital visualizations. For their part, eye-tracking devices do exactly what their name describes; the operating assumption is that our cognitive attention follows the movement of our eyes. Faig’s visual transposition of these technologies onto carpets becomes another layer of self-reflective translation.

Faig emphasizes that the works in Collective Pattern are part of his research process, not an endpoint in and of themselves. Though manifested as works of art, the pieces are part of his ongoing data collection—a temporary stopping point between questions that continue to expand, to refine his study of cognition and consciousness. What does it mean for a visual artist to explicitly invite participants into an ongoing process? These pieces—as collaborative works in progress—differ from some of his earlier collaborations with participants through performance art, where the collaboration usually happens once within the performance. Here there are a few material touchpoints. These touchpoints underscore the iterative process of Collective Pattern’s new collaboration: data collection, data accumulation, and data visualization.

The rugs of Collective Pattern stand beside Faig’s earlier sketches, holding open space for his artistic process to continue evolving. Unlike the artist’s previous rugs, the three new works on view are printed rather than made through traditional hand-weaving techniques. This deviation in material process mirrors Faig’s own impulses toward manipulation in designing a work. But where his previous manipulations emerge from the wool or silk rugs’ patterns themselves, these swaths of colors, as seen in Generation (2026), overlay—often incompletely, almost hovering—the printed patterns below.

To the viewer’s eye, in Faig’s hand-woven rugs, individual threads might seem to blur together. But one wool thread cannot entirely bleed into another. By contrast, in Collective Pattern, the printed overlay literally mixes with the pattern beneath—a blur not only in the viewer’s perception but also in the material itself. Blurring between tradition and translated cognition. Blurring between individual and collective experiences, translated into glowing color imprints. These imprints appear as floating orbs where once there were wandering eyes—blurring colors, forms, and temporalities. This is how Collective Pattern presents a new glitch waiting for meaning to be made.

Faig Ahmed: Textiles of Consciousness is on view through August 2, 2026.

The exhibition is made possible by the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; Princeton University’s Council on Science and Technology, Department of Art & Archaeology, Department of English, Effron Center for the Study of America, Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta and the Magie Fund of the Department of Classics, and University Center for Human Values; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; and generous support from contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund.