The Carpet

Life-size dimensions, based on the artist’s body
Mixed-media installation and performance.

This work uses the act of carpet weaving to explore how women struggle to present themselves fully within social, political, and cultural constraints. The structure, made from wooden canvas frame and yarns references a carpet loom, but the work is not about producing a carpet. Instead, the carpet becomes the woman herself. Threads stretch across the frame and around my body as I tie myself into the structure. To continue the process, I must repeatedly cut myself free and tie another part of my body in its place. If I want to weave a part of my body, another must be released for me to be able to do so. The performance becomes a continuous negotiation between movement and restriction.

Knots are central to the work for two reasons. In carpet weaving, every point of the pattern is created through a knot, making the surface of the carpet the accumulation of thousands of tied moments. At the same time, in Persian literature the knot carries a dual meaning: it can signify both a bond and a trouble. Some knots represent attachments we choose and value; others represent constraints we cannot easily escape. This duality reflects the ways women are simultaneously connected to, and confined by, the systems surrounding them.

When a carpet is finished, it is cut from the loom and presented as a complete work. In this piece, however, the carpet, the woman, can never be fully cut free as the carpet never gets to be fully weaved. The work remains unfinished, reflecting the reality that women are rarely able to present themselves entirely as they are, without the interruptions of expectation, politics, religion, and social norms.

The performance therefore does not produce a finished object. Instead, it reveals the ongoing labor of negotiating visibility, autonomy, and self-definition. I performed this project with my nude body in the most vulnerable but honest way I could imagine and recorded the process from different angles around the loom. I recorded the entire performance from different angles and distances with cameras positioned around me in the loom. The performance took about 15 hours, the final installation was the loom on its own with all the evidence and tracks of the process remained on it installed on the wall while the fade shadow of my body doing the performance was projected on it as if a hint of someone’s existence and labour was provided.