Today from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you an excerpt from Elnaz Bokharachi’s consideration of Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia at the Scotsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. In keeping with our Summer Session theme of labor, the author discusses weaving, production, and the impact of war on both. This article was originally published on September 21, 2015.

L-R: a 1998 war rug from Baghlan showing a map of Afghanistan (acquired in Peshawar), a 1994 rug from western Afghanistan (also acquired in Peshawar), and a 2004 rug (acquired in Kabul). Courtesy of REORIENT.

Rug weaving amongst the Iranian peoples dates back thousands of years. Although the exact provenance is unknown, the Pazyryk Carpet, woven in the fourth century B.C., and excavated from the grave of a Scythian nobleman in the Altai Mountains of Siberia in 1949, is widely recognized as the earliest known pile-woven carpet. The Iranian peoples have long been amongst the pioneers of carpet weaving, and today, hand-woven rugs from the Persianate world are still renowned for their uniqueness in design, color, size, and weave, with each culture having its own particular patterns and styles. The representation of Persian gardens, some of the most recurring and sophisticated designs in Persian carpets and rugs, celebrated for their combination of rich colors, singular border motifs, and floral patterns, are but one example. Striving to symbolize heaven on earth—paradise (derived from the Avestan pairi-daeza)—the Persian garden is depicted in the chahar bagh (lit. “four gardens”) style. Although numerous examples of such carpets have been exhibited in museums around the world, one of the most famous, namely that of the Sassanian Emperor Khosrow I (r. 531–571 A.D.), described in detail by the Persian historian Tabari, did not survive the Arab conquest of Iran. That is not to say, though, that all carpets from the region deal with the divine; there are indeed some that portray much more worldly images.

Claire C. Carter, curator of the Scotsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, recently exhibited forty-one rugs from Afghanistan featuring images of tanks, grenades, helicopters, and soldiers, amongst others, in a variety of colorful rugs differing in style and scale. Originally organized and curated by Enrico Mascelloni and Annemarie Sawkins, Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia—previously on view at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee and Florida’s Boca Raton Museum of Art—was a narration of the story of a people who did away with traditional patterns and motifs to instead unfold a story of violence and conflict.

Read the full article here.