DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet: Collage as Heterotopia in Nevin Aladağ’s Social Fabric Series Kristin Dickinson University of Michigan Abstract: This article examines contemporary Turkish German artist Nevin Aladağ’s carpet collages Wind (2019) and Skylight Spring (2021) in relation to the iconic window designs of American Midwestern architect Frank Lloyd Wright. By cutting up and conjoining pieces of distinctly patterned carpets from around the world, Aladağ plays with the trope of the Oriental carpet and Orientalism’s hierarchical ordering system. Her collagistic compositions, which incorporate stylistic elements of Wright’s design practice, link disparate patterns, times, and places. Building on Wright’s own understanding of windows as light screens that connect inside and outside, Dickinson reads Aladağ’s collages as powerful heterotopias that cut across multiple other boundaries. Upending the scopic regime of Orientalism, they challenge distinctions between Orient/ Occident and traditional/ modern, while encouraging the viewer to rethink the power of her own gaze and personal associations with the work of art. Keywords: Nevin Aladağ, Oriental carpet, collage, heterotopia, Frank Lloyd Wright In her Social Fabric series (2017-present), Turkish German installation and performance artist Nevin Aladağ creates textile collages by cutting up and conjoining pieces of distinctly patterned carpets from around the world. Hailing from the Maghreb, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, China, Ireland, the United States, Germany, and other locations, the individual components of any given collage consist of virgin wool flatwoven kilims, silk hand-knotted pile carpets, and industrially produced tretford, sisal, and wool carpets. Using a mixture of fluid and geometric lines, Aladağ separates individual carpet pieces with cord-like border lines in black, yellow, blue, red and/ or pink. Glued onto a wooden backing and 438 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 surrounded in a simple black frame, individual collages take different shapes and range in size from approximately 4’x5’ to 9’x10’. On a metaphorical level, the multiplicity of patterns, piles, and styles of carpet built into Aladağ’s collages remind us of the myriad roles carpets have played historically: As simple and functional items, they provide warmth and comfort in the home. Folded up, more sturdy carpets double as bags to transport goods. In religious contexts, smaller carpets provide a place to pray or to hold important ceremonies such as weddings. As floor and entryway coverings, intricately designed carpets bring color and pattern into living spaces, while also at times denoting social status. Likewise, carpets’ motifs and symbols enable the multigenerational transmission of local stories and myths, even as their histories are bound up with transcultural exchange and transcontinental trade. By reminding us of the many different meanings and roles carpets have historically held, the collages in Aladag’s Social Fabric series present a powerful counterforce to the history of European Orientalism and its engagement with the so-called Oriental carpet. Through the domestication of Oriental carpets, middle-class nineteenth-century European households also vacated them of their historical and social functions. Spurred on by Orientalist paintings, exhibitions, and advertisments, middle-class interest in the Oriental carpet is indicative of its role as a “civilizational commodity,” or a “commodit[y] that serve[s] to characterize the Orient and Occident as opposing realms occupying different hierarchical positions in the civilizational ladder” (Moallem 50). Aladağ’s carpet collages serve on the contrary as powerful heterotopias, indicating the impossibility of closure or clear-cut distinctions between Orient and Occident or traditional and modern. Even as Aladağ encases the individual pieces of her collages within clearly visible border lines, her final juxtaposition of patterns, colors, and materials enacts a transgression of boundaries that undoes Orientalism’s ordering system. Whereas the European visual motif of the carpet proves static, Aladağ’s collages are thus open-ended, embracing change and becoming over being. In contrast to Orientalism, and more specifically to Orientalist carpet studies, which is generally concerned with questions of provenance and identification, Aladağ’s collages blur the concept of origins altogether. Just as the individual elements of each collage are not labeled - making it nearly impossible to determine where each piece originated - Aladağ’s patterns and images bely a wide range of design elements. While some collages take inspiration from the natural world, others draw on Celtic symbolism, impressionism, or modernist artforms such as cubism, Bauhaus, and De Stijl art, among others. Due to their open-ended and eclectic qualities, these collages also encourage viewers to draw and reflect on their own personal associations with each work of art, which in turn contributes to its multifaceted meanings and connotations. As a series, Social Fabric thus DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 439 harnesses the disruptive power of collage to bring otherwise disparate elements into relation. The often-unexpected connotations that arise therefrom hold the power to interrupt the master narratives of Orientalism, which suggest that the Orient can be easily contained, domesticated, and consumed. Fig. 1: Aladağ, Wind (2019) Fig. 2: Aladağ, Skylight Spring (2021) 440 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 In the following, I first address the significance of Orientalism for Aladağ’s overall artistic practice, before taking up her particular engagement with the Oriental carpet as a specific form of Orientalia in the Social Fabric series. In conclusion, I offer a case study, in which I explore my own personal associations between Aladağ’s carpet collages Wind (2019) and Skylight Spring (2021) and the window designs of early twentieth-century American architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright. Central to Wright’s architectural practice, patterned windows connected interior and exterior spaces without rendering the border between them obsolete. Through their incorporation of stylistic elements from different periods of Wright’s design practice, I read Wind and Skylight Spring as linking disparate patterns, times, and places through their unique compositions, thus extending and reenvisioning Wright’s design goals. As such, they open up space for new and unexpected associations between the symbols and imagery of a wide variety of Oriental carpets and Wright’s geometric representations of the Midwestern American prairie. In doing so, they place categories such as traditional and modern into a new creative tension, revealing a fluidity of influence relevant to our readings of Aladağ’s and Wright’s design practices alike. Given Aladağ’s use of a variety of carpet types from across the world, why read her collages as a visual response to Orientalist engagement with the Oriental carpet in particular? Firstly, I see engagement with the tropes of Orientalism as a recurring theme in Aladağ’s artistic practice. Already in 2016, her public installation Screen I-III took up questions of weaving to address the power of observation and visualization so central to Orientalism. First commissioned by the public sculpture initiative Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (KÖR) in Vienna, Screen I-III was on display in the pedestrian zone at Kunstplatz Graben in 2016. The sculptures were later incorporated into a show featuring Aladağ’s work at the Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf in 2018. Consisting of three steel frames resembling looms, Screen I-III utilizes Rauris marble and Waldviertel granite cobblestones to create designs of varying transparency along stainless steel warp and weft “threads.” These raw materials for Screen I-III were quarried at the former sites of the Mauthausen and St. George concentration camps in northern Austria. By weaving these material references to National Socialism into her sculpture, Aladağ gestures toward the racialization of minorities throughout German and Austrian history, and the grueling labor that camp inmates were subjected to in these same quarries. The marble and granite stones furthermore link past and present through their visual similarity to surrounding pavers and cobblestones at the site of installation in Vienna. Notably, these cobblestones are woven into a structure that is also reminiscent of a mashrabiya, a projecting window often found on the upper floor of buildings in Islamic architecture, which is enclosed in carved wood latticework. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 441 Functioning as a screen, the mashrabiya allows women to look out, while remaining hidden from view. The mashrabiya is often associated with early Orientalism, the exoticization of the Orient, and the objectification of women. Yet the mashrabiya also endows the person behind the screen with the power of observation, placing them in a position of privilege (Woodbridge 407). Aladağ’s screens gesture toward these complex power dynamics of visualization through their varying levels of opacity. By holding in tension disparate cultural and historical references, they form dynamic wholes that nevertheless refuse the power of racial categorization so central to National Socialism and Orientalism alike. On the contrary, they lay claim to public space in a manner that constantly asks viewers to reflect not only on what , but also how they see. The power and the politics of vision are also central to the history of the Oriental carpet. In her book-length study of Western commodification of the Persian carpet in particular, Minoo Moallem argues that we cannot understand the history of Oriental carpets outside of the Orientalist practices of seeing and displaying them (14). Such Orientalist viewing regimes projected a false legibility onto cultural codes, symbols, designs, and materials that were otherwise opaque to non-local actors. Pointing to the widespread introduction of Persian carpets into the European marketplace in the late nineteenth century, Moallem reads carpets as part of a chain of goods known as Orientalia. Ranging from jewelry to furniture, Orientalia comprise any material objects associated with Islam (often referred to as Muhammadan or Musulman at the time), the Orient, or more specifically Persia in nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe and America. By bringing “the cultural and religious difference of Eastern people to the heart of the empire,” Orientalia epitomized European Orientalist assumptions about the collectability of the cultures and art of Oriental peoples. As dislocated and decontextualized objects, Oriental carpets upheld essentialist notions of time and culture that worked to produce an image of the Orient as located outside of history (47). In contrast to the designs and weaving techniques of the carpets themselves - which attest to long histories of cultural borrowing and exchange across geographic, cultural, and ethnic lines - Oriental carpets consumed under the sign of Orientalia served as “boundary objects” (49), which signified a separation of East from West. Central to the overall discourse of Orientalism, Orientalia helped to construct the Orient as a portable and imaginary space that could be incorporated into the European home (51). As objects intended to be touched, walked on, and sat upon, carpets also engaged the senses, lending themselves well to a unique form of domestication that brought European consumers seemingly close to an otherwise distant Orient (50). By symbolizing a consumable Orient that could be brought back to Europe on demand, carpets also served more specifically as what Moallem terms “civilizational commodities.” More 442 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 than simply exotic and mysterious goods, civilizational commodities “constituted cultural distinctions and civilizational hierarchies […] that maintained the boundaries between the East and the West, the Oriental and the Occidental, the primitive and the modern, and the religious and the secular, no matter their proximity to or distance from the observer” (50). Nineteenth-century European middle-class interest in the Oriental carpet grew out of a much longer history of consumption and representation. European artists displayed an interest in Oriental carpets as early as the 1500s, for example, when Italian and Dutch Renaissance painters began portraying carpets from the Ottoman Empire as floor coverings or furniture decoration. Ironically, many carpets from the Middle East - such as the Lotto, Holbein, Ghirlandaio, Crivelli, and Memling - are now named after the European painters who depicted them in detail during this time period (Denny, “Islamic Carpets”). Due to both distance and expense, however, Oriental carpets remained a limited luxury import in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mainly utilized in the home furnishings of Italian, French, and Eastern European nobility (Helfgott 14). Fig. 3: Robertson, “A Carpet Seller, Cairo” (1885) It was not until the late nineteenth century that Persian carpets began entering the European market in large numbers. At this time, a European middle-class familiarity with and interest in Oriental carpets was in part stimulated by Orientalist painters focused on the Middle East. Presenting a romanticized and dramatized view of local life, their work often incorporated depictions of carpets and textiles as an authenticating gesture (Thompson 35—36). “A Carpet Seller, Cairo” DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 443 (1885) by British Orientalist painter Charles Robertson is an excellent example of this. On the one hand, this painting displays incredible attention to detail in its representation of three Caucasian carpets, a Turkish flatwoven prayer rug, and a hanging Uzbek embroidery, among other objects. On the other hand, it creates a heightened sense of drama in its larger-than-life portrayal of Oriental textiles, in comparison to which the human figures appear abnormally small. Fig. 4: Gérôme, “The Carpet Merchant” (1887) “The Carpet Merchant” (1887) by French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme creates a similar effect. Depicting the court of the rug market in Cairo, which Gérôme had visited in 1885, this painting features several carpets folded up and strewn about the floor, as well as one enormous, detailed carpet draped over 444 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 a balcony. Within the overall composition of this painting, the human figures barely reach one third of this carpet’s length. From the intricately patterned carpets and realistic architectural elements to the wide variety of robes and headdresses they depict, details lend these paintings a documentary feel. Overall, however, paintings such as Robertson’s and Gérôme’s pandered to European fantasies of the Middle East through their portrayal of stereotypical costumes and settings, such as the bazar. Both paintings utilize bright and vivid colors, for example, and feature mustached or bearded men in turbans alongside the exotic goods of carpets and textiles. Perceived by European viewers as faithful records of an exotic and unchanging Orient, such representations helped to solidify an understanding of the Orient as geographically and temporally separate from Europe. Several German and Austrian Orientalist painters participated in this artistic tradition: Ludwig Deutsch’s The Scholar (1885) features a man in robe and turban lounging on patterned cushions with a carpet at his feet. Gustav Bauernfeind’s paintings of Jerusalem and the Holy Land - such as Sentinel at the Entrance to the Masjid al Aqsa (1883) and Forecourt of the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus (1880) - feature carpets and textiles as integral to their setting. Oriental Courtyard with Mother and Child (A Family Weaving) (1869) by Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner features a mother and child weaving at the loom in an inner courtyard, and Beauty with a Tambourine (1867) depicts an interior with a woman lounging on deep red cushions, a lush, patterned carpet in gold, dark blue, and teal hues at her feet. Both paintings depict intimate scenes to which Werner likely did not have access, underscoring the importance of hearsay and imagination for Orientalist paintings. Beauty in particular draws on a widespread Orientalist fascination with the harem, and depictions of languid women, sequestered far from the eyes of strangers. Finally, Werner’s An Artist at Work in His Studio (1854) prominently displays a prayer rug and a hand-knotted pile rug in the studio of a European artist, underscoring the role of the carpet as a mobile object that could bring the exotic character of the Orient into the European home, while paradoxically solidifying the distance between Orient and Occident. In addition to their frequent representations in Orientalist paintings, Leonard Helfgott attributes two additional factors to the rise in European demand for Oriental carpets in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the European Orientalist fascination with “primitive cultures” drove a newfound demand for village and nomadic flatwoven carpets. Starting with the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna, this style of Turkish, Caucasian, and Turkmen carpets became a standard feature of nearly all international exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. On the other hand, as colonialism and imperialism spurred renewed European scholarly and popular fascination with the DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 445 arts of Asia, private collectors and museums also began to treat sixteenthand seventeenth-century Safavid hand-knotted workshop carpets as representative of an artform in their own right. In 1892, for example, the Victoria and Albert Museum paid the extravagant sum of £2,500 for the world’s oldest dated carpet - the Ardabil carpet - which is named after the place of its creation in northwest Iran. Prior to its acquisition by the museum, this carpet adorned the burial site of Sufi leader and founder of the Safavid dynasty Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili (Helfgott 15). Finally, exhibitions played an important role in the popularization of Oriental carpets in turn-of-the-century Europe. In the German-speaking world, the 1891 exhibition “Ausstellung orientalischer Teppiche” [Exhibition of Oriental Carpets] arranged by the Imperial Austrian Trade Museum, was the first of its kind (Erdman 34). It was followed by a huge exhibition of “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst” [Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art] held in Munich in 1910. Of the 3,500 items on display in this exhibition, 229 were carpets that were also catalogued by the main curator and German art historian Friedrich Sarre in a massive three-volume publication. 1 This exhibition was originally conceptualized as an “Orientalische Ausstellung” [Oriental Exhibition] by the Bavarian crown prince Rupprecht, who sought to recognize and showcase the value of a set of Safavid carpets (otherwise known as the Polish carpet group) in the Wittelsbach collection at the Residence Museum in Munich (Troelenberg 2). While Sarre drastically expanded the scope of this exhibit, Eva-Maria Troelenberg notes that the genre of the carpet as an Islamic artform did constitute a central component of the exhibition. Not only did Sarre feature the Safavid carpets in the main entrance hall, but he also displayed them in a manner reminiscent of masterpieces in an art gallery, with large pieces arranged on a neutral wall. Carpets were furthermore featured in several additional exhibit halls, including carpets from Iran and India in hall 24, carpets and textiles from India in halls 35-38, large numbers of Turkish, Iranian, and Armenian carpets in hall 39, and carpets identified as hailing from “Asia Minor” in hall 71 (Troelenberg 16—19). While Sarre and his main assistant Ernst Kühnel hoped to create an exhibition that could go beyond Orientalist clichés and popularize Islamic art, 2 they ultimately fell short of this goal. The exhibition was large and overwhelming, difficult for any single person to navigate in a single day. While the exhibition displayed many carpets as “masterpieces,” thus underscoring their value as works of art, this understanding of the masterpiece also depended on a conservative and Eurocentric approach, which took European high culture as an important reference point (Troelenberg 11). The exhibition also contained workshop-like settings, which were clearly modeled on colonial living history displays commonly found at World’s Fairs and other exhibitions in the late nineteenth and 446 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 early twentieth centuries. An example of this is the Caravanserai, where representatives from the Ottoman Empire demonstrated traditional handicrafts, including metalwork and carpet knotting (Troelenberg 3). 3 Beyond the artistic representation and exhibition of Oriental carpets, Germany - and the port city of Hamburg specifically - have been at the center of the Oriental carpet trade since the late nineteenth century. As Moallem notes, the establishment of trade routes between the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe was an integral aspect of colonialism and Orientalism alike (50). Notably, long before the establishment of the German nation state in 1871, Hamburg was already central to European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century, through its role in moving goods brought by Portuguese and Danish merchants from the West Indies and West Africa. As Germany began colonizing parts of several African countries, northeastern New Guinea, Samoa, and numerous Micronesian islands in the late nineteenth century, the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg not only became the central colonial metropolis of the German Empire but also the largest port and trading center in mainland Europe for colonial goods (Krajewsky 144—48). The massive warehouses in Hamburg’s 300,000 square-meter Speicherstadt district received, stored, and moved raw materials such as palm kernels, rubber, and ivory; exotic foodstuffs including spices, cocoa, and coffee; and goods such as Oriental carpets (Krajewsky 147). As a major entry point for handwoven carpets into Europe, the Speicherstadt housed 200-250 carpet warehouses up until the 1980s. While this number has lessened with the increased popularity of online shopping, roughly one third of the world’s carpets still move through the city’s port every year (Körber Stiftung, “Alle Teppiche”). Hamburg’s role in the carpet trade belies the links between colonialism and Orientalism. While Oriental carpets came from regions outside of the German colonial empire, such as Iran and the Ottoman Empire, Germany nevertheless sought to assert cultural and economic influence in these regions through projects such as the Baghdad Railway, which provided access to regions colonized by other European powers. In an attempt to pay homage to Hamburg’s role in the carpet trade, the Körber Stiftung unveiled a new work of public art commemorating its sixtieth anniversary on September 4, 2019: a Steinerner Orientteppich , or an Oriental carpet made of stone. Designed by artist Frank Raendchen, this twenty-seven-meter-long mosaic spans the length of Wilhelm’s Bridge and incorporates one and a half tons of marble granules to simulate the look of a knotted-pile carpet. 4 While the promotional materials for this project foreground the social aspect of historic weaving practices, the artwork itself ultimately invites a non-reflective mode of participation that flattens the history of carpet production and the European consumption of Orientalia alike. Completely sidestepping the colonial history DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 447 that underpins Hamburg’s role in the carpet trade, the Körber Stiftung presents the Steinerner Orientteppich as a beacon of cultural understanding. Through its artistic adaptation of Turkmen knotting techniques that, “Glück bringen, Unheil abwenden, Wohlstand und Fruchtbarkeit der Herden symbolisieren sollen” [“bring luck, ward off evil, and symbolize prosperity and fertility], they argue, the Steinerner Orientteppich symbolizes their organization’s generic goals of “Brücken bauen, Hilfen geben, Impulse setzen, Verständnis fördern, national und international” [building bridges, offering assistance, providing impetuses, and promoting understanding, both nationally and internationally] (“Neuer Steinerner Orientteppich”). A 360-degree virtual tour offers visitors tools to interpret the carpet’s main symbols vis-à-vis these goals. As a symbol of prosperity and openness, the lotus blossom indicates Hamburg’s openness toward new ideas and other cultures, as embodied by its port and history of international trade. The water jug symbolizes in turn purity and hospitality, serving as a welcoming sign to tourists who are invited to walk on the carpet. As a representation of rebirth, the rose gestures toward Raendchen’s re-envisioning of an earlier 2005 design for the 2019 Steinerner Orientteppich . Finally, the evil eye - portrayed in pared-down geometric diamond shapes - serves as a talisman for the carpet and the city alike (“360-Grad-Tour”). In addition to its metaphoric placement on a physical bridge, the Steinerner Orientteppich is intended to symbolize the “bridging” of cultural domains, by transferring these traditional motifs from the Middle East into the German public domain. With an empty nod to communal weaving practices, the Körber Stiftung invited the people of Hamburg to participate in the artistic process by laying stone pieces together with Raendchen and his team. In stark contrast to the historic embodied practice of weaving, however, these “helpers” were then presented as mere statistics for the execution of the project: “4 weeks, 27 meters, 2,000 kilograms of stone, 120 liters of synthetic resin, 50 helpers” (“Neuer Steinerner Orientteppich”). Overall, the production process and promotional materials for the Steinerner Orientteppich reflect the historic consumption and domestication of Oriental carpets in Europe. The Körber Stiftung displays no understanding of how the European demand for Oriental carpets completely transformed the historic production of carpets in the Middle East, for example, or how the European consumption of Orientalia served as one important lynchpin for the discourse of Orientalism. By instructing viewers how to read the Steinerner Orientteppich as a symbol of Hamburg’s openness to the world, the 360-degree virtual tour also ignores the significance of its port for the movement of colonial goods and thus also the economic underpinnings of colonialism. The promotional language for the Steinerner Orientteppich echoes rather that of UNESCO and the city of Hamburg more generally, which bill the Hafencity and 448 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Speicherstadt as “must-see” tourist destinations with UNESCO world heritage status, without ever mentioning Hamburg’s important role in the larger history of European colonialism or the German colonial empire more specifically. 5 Aladağ’s carpet collages present a striking counterexample to Raendchen’s Steinerner Orientteppich . Through the practice of collage, I argue, Aladağ invites viewers to reflect on their own personal connections and associations with individual works of art in the Social Fabric series. Given the complexities of her collages - which not only incorporate but also obscure and cut off symbols and designs - Aladağ creates a whole that is not easy to consume. Rather than invite any clear-cut form of interpretation, Aladağ’s unique combinations of colors and styles stress the impossibility of pinpointing the origins or definitive meanings of woven designs and symbols that have been utilized by many different cultures across generations. By highlighting the social function of carpets and textiles more generally, Social Fabric asks viewers rather to critically reflect on their own personal associations with works of art in the series, with the understanding that these associations may vary drastically from person to person. This emphasis on the personal is also borne out through Aladağ’s titular phrase “social fabric,” which draws a metaphorical connection between the thousands of individual threads that are woven together in a piece of fabric and the myriad metaphorical threads that hold us together as a society. While the tightly woven warp (lengthwise threads) and weft (crosswise threads) of a fabric are invisible to the naked eye, they function similarly to the social interactions and connections that bind us to one another, helping to create a set of shared values and sense of community. In relation to the history of the carpet, Aladağ’s title calls to mind another well-known phrase relevant to carpet studies, namely “ties that bind.” Pointing again to structures of social cohesion, this phrase also more specifically recalls the art of carpet making, particularly hand-knotted pile carpets, more commonly referred to as “Oriental” or “Persian” carpets. These carpets are created through an intricate process of tying hundreds of thousands of knots around warp threads. Tightly anchored by weft threads, these knots are then cut to a specific length (pile), which determine the color and pattern of the rug. The value of said carpets is partly determined by knot density, or knots per square inch (KPSI), which may range anywhere from 25 to 1,000. 6 The phrase “ties that bind” thus highlights both the final woven or knotted product of the carpet and the processes of weaving and knotting. It also gestures metaphorically toward the important social function weaving has played as a communal activity, particularly for tribal and nomadic communities such as the Turkmens. Much more than a subset of technical knowledge, weaving was historically a social and an embodied activity undertaken by women and their daugh- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 449 ters. In Oriental Carpets: From the Tents, Cottages and Workshops of Asia (1988) for example, Jon Thompson highlights the importance of traditional kilims, or flatwoven rugs, for the preservation of knowledge across generations. Patterns, he argues, are passed on like melodies from mothers to daughters; these patterns are not sketched or written down but are rather retained from generation to generation through a process of live transmission. While patterns are distinct to local communities, they also change over time, reflecting local socio-economic conditions, and processes of exchange with neighboring communities (16). This social aspect of carpet weaving is often ignored, undermined, or used to uphold denigrating views of weavers in Orientalist scholarship. Thompson himself, for example, notes that while weavers have nicknames for the patterns they use, these names have “no value in determining the root meaning of a design” (155). He portrays weavers as both ignorant of the meanings behind the designs they use, and as incapable of retaining in their memories the large and more complex patterns used in workshop carpets (5, 155). In her survey of European connoisseur books on Oriental carpets from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Moallem notes similar trends. These books repeatedly emphasize carpet weaving techniques, which are described as an extension of nature, and thus as distinctly separate from modern technological advancements (34). In Rugs of the Orient (1911), for example, C.R. Clifford concludes that the “simple” designs of flatwoven carpets are not worthy of “logical analysis” because they have been “inspired always by primitive thought” (71). By associating traditional patterns and weaving techniques with the primitive, authors like Clifford relegate carpet weaving to an older temporal order than the one they write from. These patterns in scholarship persist well into the twentieth century. In the 1980s, for example, E. Gans-Ruedin laments the difficulty of obtaining an explanation of carpet designs from the weavers themselves: “They use such and such motif in accordance with tradition,” he writes, “but they are no longer aware of its original meaning” (7). Already in her series’ title, Aladağ counters this separation of the carpet from its social dimensions. By gesturing toward the carpet as a form of “social fabric,” Aladağ reminds us of the important role it can play in structuring a living space or serving as a transmitter of cultural memory. In her personal reflection on the role of the Persian carpet in the expatriate American home, for example, Behin Forghanifar describes carpets as “salient objects for a shared remembering of […] history, religious beliefs, and traditional values” (n. pag.). Handmade carpets in particular, she notes, are often passed down as cultural heritage. Due to their complex symbolism, they are regularly used in special occasions such as ceremonies or religious rituals. Beyond this, the Persian carpet has also been central to daily interactions among family members. Given that sofas were not common in 450 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 middleor working-class homes of the early twentieth century, families would often gather around the carpet to engage in collective activities such as eating or dancing; in contemporary homes, carpets still often structure living spaces, with furniture arranged around them. Reflecting on the significance of woven carpets for families in rural Morocco, textile artist Terra Fuller further notes the multiple roles they play within the entire cycle of life: “Newlyweds sleep on the carpets; babies are conceived and are born on the carpets, and the elderly pass away on the carpets. In other words, the entire cycle of life from conception to death occurs on these carpets” (qtd. in Moallem, “Weaving Connections”). As these examples show, the social function of carpets is often strongly linked to the act of weaving. But handwoven carpets are only one aspect of Aladağ’s collages. Machine-made carpets with minimal to no designs also play a prominent structural role in the Social Fabric series. Whereas an Orientalist fetishization of the primitive simultaneously evacuates the carpet of its social function, Aladağ arguably calls attention to the social function of carpets and carpet making by contrasting valuable hand-knotted pile carpets with industrially produced ones. In her restaging of an otherwise horizontal form in a new vertical format, Aladağ also brings the carpet to eye level, calling attention not only to juxtapositions in pattern, but also pile, texture, and material that are visible to the naked eye. Fig. 5: Closeup of Carpet Collage, photograph by Trevor Good DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 451 While undiscerning visitors may not be able to determine a carpet’s origins, or even a handwoven from a machine-made patterned carpet, certain pieces clearly resemble uniformly colored, industrially produced wall-to-wall carpets, whereas others incorporate patterns and piles historically associated with handmade Oriental ones. Aladağ’s collages consist only of contemporary carpets, however, meaning it is entirely plausible that the more “Oriental” looking pieces were produced in Europe or the United States, whereas the industrial office-style carpets could just as easily come from Turkey or Morocco. By withholding this information from visitors, Aladağ fosters an uncertainty, which both emphasizes each collage’s individual parts, while also creating a work of art that exceeds the sum of those parts through its collagist composition. 7 Aladağ’s strategic placement of what appear to be industrially produced monochrome carpet pieces inside more intricately patterned pieces exemplifies this uncertainty. In the top lefthand corner of Wind , for example, a small, bright yellow circle is inserted inside a nearly square piece with a more intricate arabesque design in white, beige, and subdued blues. Arabesque designs often portray vines, tendrils, leaves, and blossoms, and require a high knot density to achieve a fluidity of line (Stone 28). In Wind , this arabesque piece is juxtaposed on its bottom left with a bright red half-oval shape that also appears to have been industrially produced. Given the lack of labels for individual pieces, such juxtapositions do not solidify binaries such as handwoven and machine-made, traditional and modern, or valuable and inexpensive, but rather put the assumed tension between these categories into question. This idea is exemplified through the three interlocking circles in Skylight Spring , in which pieces from a wide variety of carpets overlap and interconnect to create the main focal point of the collage. In this collagist design format, all individual carpet pieces are integral to the overall design, meaning no single piece is more important than another, regardless of potential origin or value. Derived from the French word coller , meaning to glue or stick together, “collage” indicates the technique of creating a new work of art from a wide range of other materials, such as fibrous paper, photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, or fabric to a given surface. While collage is a very old and common practice all over the world, it gained importance as a critical tactic in the early twentieth century, when it was embraced by artists dedicated to revolutionary change in society, such as the Dadaists and Surrealists on the left, and Italy’s futurists on the right (Higgins 25). Like the work of these artists, Aladağ’s carpet collages disrupt the illusion of a whole, coherent, organic artwork, reminding us that so-called Oriental carpets cannot be so easily consumed and domesticated. Through both their individual component parts and final designs -which carry meanings and emotive resonances that may exceed the viewer’s own knowledge or capacity for understanding, even as they evoke new, unexpected associations 452 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 - Aladağ’s collages undo the Orientalist regime of carpet gazing by hinting at more complex forms of reading and legibility. Through the collage form, Aladağ also reminds us of the heterotopic qualities of carpets more generally. In his 1996 essay “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault coined the term “heterotopia” to describe spaces that both mirror and upset the outside world. Unlike utopias, which are sites without a real place, heterotopias juxtapose several spaces within a single real place, or several sites that may otherwise seem incompatible (25). In addition to the cinema and the theater, Foucault lists the traditional Persian garden as one example of a heterotopia, the confined space of which represents a symbolic microcosm of the world. Ships represent in turn heterotopias par excellence: as a floating piece of space, a ship is both closed in on itself, while also moving and connecting peoples, places, and goods from across the globe (27). Moallem describes Persian carpets as embodying the inherent danger of heterotopias, in that they resist closure by “spill[ing] over [their] frame aesthetically” (8). They are both commodities that are bought and sold on the international market and phantasmatic objects linked to long-standing Orientalist tropes such as the flying carpet. Handwoven carpets further link production and consumption, as well as labor and leisure. Through their history of exportation to the West, Persian carpets also force us to consider categories such as “East” and “West” together via a commodity that “moves in space, but [whose] localization continuously integrates a form of extension, a relation to other sites” (8). In many ways, the concept of heterotopia is akin to the process of weaving itself. The act of weaving entails shuttling a transverse weft thread over and under, as well as back and forth across stationary warp threads, which are held in place on the loom’s frame. It is in this tension between movement and stasis that Françoise Lionnet locates a form of “double critique” in the metaphor of weaving. Through a series of crossings that both overlap and bind together, the weft yarn must constantly double back on itself, while simultaneously extending the textile by transcending a previously established boundary (404—05). Whether hand woven or machine made, the individual pieces in Aladağ’s collages work together to exemplify and extend the heterotopic quality of carpets. As such, these collages stand in direct contradiction to the field of carpet studies, which is highly concerned with questions of provenance and classification. Experienced carpet scholars often identify a carpet’s origin by examining its design. If this method fails due to the shared use of symbols across cultural and geographic borders, experts also look to other key elements of identification, including a carpet’s structure (coarser vs. finer weave; flatwoven vs. knotted-pile carpet), material (wool, cotton, silk, mohair, camel hair, etc.), size and shape (rectangular, square, circular), color palette (bold vs. earth-toned colors; natural vs. synthetic DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 453 dyes), and fringe and/ or selvedge edge. Finally, the most reliable method of identifying a carpet’s origin is by looking at its backside. Noting the many intricacies of weaving and knotting techniques, P.R.J. Ford goes so far as to argue that trained carpet scholars and merchants can trace a given carpet to its precise village of origin with only a quick glance at its backside (10). This is also the main method of identifying “authentic” carpets from imitation products with similar designs. Aladağ’s collages thwart the desire to pinpoint carpets’ origins on many levels. Many snippets of carpets are simply too small to identify a clear design; others isolate a single element - such as a star, triangle, or hook - that would otherwise be repeated within the carpet to create a larger pattern such as a central medallion or a border. Importantly, Aladağ does not label the individual pieces of her designs. Cut up and pasted onto a wooden backing, each carpet’s backside is furthermore rendered inaccessible, as are its original edges, size, shape, and overall design. What remains accessible to the viewer are pieces of designs, which often appear to be strategically interrupted and/ or rearranged to create an entirely new design through the collage format. An example of this can be found in the bottom left section of Wind . Here, one carpet fragment clearly depicts part of a geometricized animal in red and gold on a beige background, with several other smaller figures in red, gold, and blue tones surrounding the larger animal. Such stylized, abstract, and geometric animals are common in Oriental carpet designs. Nomadic peoples often incorporated domesticated animals such as goats and horses into their designs, whereas tigers are often found in carpets from Southwest Tibet and lions are prominent in carpets from Southwest Iran. Such animals often symbolize a specific trait. The crane, for example, is a symbol of longevity in China. In other cases, however, animal designs hold no specific symbolic importance. At times, geometric designs may even recall the shape of an animal, where no likeness was necessarily intended, such as the Eagle Kazak or running dog border designs (Stone 26). While the red and gold shape represented in Aladağ’s collage clearly depicts an animal, her strategic decision to cut off its head renders the image ambiguous to viewers. With only its back half visible - including one leg, a tail, and what could possibly be a wing - the figure resembles the shape of the Akstafa Peakcock design, for example, but could just as easily represent a mammal wearing a saddle. Examples such as this take the issue of authenticity out of the equation altogether, raising instead more complex questions about cultural borrowing through the new associative connections they give rise to. By removing identifiable elements of a design, Aladağ encourages viewers to let go of the urge to pinpoint specific meanings, asking them instead to reflect on their desire to do so in the first place. In contrast to the Steinerner Orientteppich in Hamburg, Aladağ’s collage practice encourages us to think of carpet weaving not as the production of 454 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 specific symbols that serve as singular points of reference, but as a cross-cultural practice steeped in relationality: symbols gain meaning not simply within individual, insulated cultures, but in relation to other symbols, or variations on a given symbol. Rather than foster a superficial mode of understanding, Aladağ’s collages thus reflect on the semiotic processes whereby cultural artifacts and their meanings are created again and again in a relational and open-ended manner. Evoking many potential associations, Wind and Skylight Spring are no exceptions. Their bright colors and strong lines punctuated by spheric structures have celestial qualities, recalling planets aligning or stars surrounded by beams of sunlight. Pasted together, certain strips of fabric also form letters, such as a P embedded in a D in the top lefthand quadrant of Wind . And the repetition of rectangular carpet strips in Skylight Spring emulates wall tiles rearranged in vertical format, recalling Aladağ’s decision to display her carpet collages on the wall instead of the floor. Fig. 6: Wright, Tree of Life Window (1904) © 2024 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Licensed by Artists Rights Society. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 455 As a scholar situated in the American Midwest, Wind and Skylight Spring also evoke for me the iconic window designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. While incorporating elements of Wright’s Prairie-style Windows (1897-1909) - which utilize rectilinear and chevron motifs to form large symmetrical patterns - these collages also utilize the bolder colors, circles, and asymmetrical designs of the windows Wright would later create for the Coonley Playhouse in 1912. Fig. 7: Wright, Coonley Playhouse Windows (1912) © 2024 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Licensed by Artists Rights Society. Skylight Spring in particular incorporates bright reds, yellows, and blues, which give the impression of a stained glass window in the sunlight. Given Aladağ’s use of the word “skylight” in her title - which suggests an association with windows - her use of black border lines between carpet pieces also recalls the 456 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 brass-, zinc-, or copper-plated cames separating individual pieces in Wright’s so-called “light screens.” Wright not only used this term to refer to the patterned windows of his earlier designs, but he also used the language of textiles to describe their function within a building: “woven about the space as enclosure, [they take] the place of the solid walls” (qtd. in Sloan 45). What might we gain by bringing Wright’s conception of light screens to our reading of Wind and Skylight Spring? More than one-to-one comparisons or studies of influence, Aladağ’s compositions invite us to extend the work of collage, by juxtaposing her own work with that of others. Viewing Aladağ’s compositions alongside Wright’s may then remind us of the varied influences on his work at the turn of the century. In his autobiography, for example, Wright names Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) as an important source of inspiration for the decorative patterns of his early windows (75). Jones’s lavish folio incorporated 112 illustrated plates featuring patterns, motifs, and ornaments from nineteen diverse cultures, including Arabian, Byzantine, Indian, Greek, Persian, and Moresque. Wright recalls making one hundred tracings from this book , pointing to the early importance of so-called Oriental ornamental designs for his own design practice, which is generally understood as quintessentially modern. Small facts such as these play into Aladağ’s critical engagement with the tropes of Orientalism through the associative connections her collages evoke. Notably, Wright’s use of weaving terminology was not limited to discussion of his windows. In his architectural notes, he also describes the vertical and horizontal elements of a building as the “warp and woof ” of the structure (Sloan 45). Julie L. Sloan traces Wright’s persistent interest in fabric and weaving to his childhood, when his mother gave him a set of Froebel gifts (45). First designed by German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel in the 1840s, these toys support children in their fine motor development while also allowing them to explore elements of math, science, engineering, and architecture through an emphasis on pattern and geometric order (“Froebel’s Gifts”). The fourteenth gift of the Froebel system is “weaving paper,” or a sheet of paper with slots representing the warp, through which children weave additional paper strips as a woof. 8 Sloan reads many of Wright’s window patterns - such as the stairwell windows of the Dana House or the windows’ checkerboard patterns in houses for E.A. Gilmore - as taking inspiration from woven designs. Notably, Wright also created a “glass tapestry” for the Susan Lawrence Dana House. Supported only at the top, this piece hangs like a fiber tapestry in front of a plate glass window (Sloan 45—46). Reading Aladağ’s carpet collages alongside Wright’s window designs brings the significance of weaving for Wright’s practice to the fore. Recalling a like- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 457 ness between fabric and glass, it highlights how both windows and carpets may serve as screens, through which to see the world. Indeed, one reason Foucault describes carpets as heterotopias is due to the historic role of Persian carpets as “reproductions” of gardens through their symbolic representations of flowers, vines, and trees. Whereas the vegetation of the garden represented a microcosm of the world, sixteenth-century Persian carpets present “a sort of garden that can move across space” (Foucault 26). While not all carpets represent gardens, their diverse motifs and symbols gesture toward broad forms of human experience, incorporate talismans to ward off evil, and contain images that narrate cultural histories. Notably, Oriental carpets also employ a series of frames: In addition to a wider main border, most Oriental carpets have several thinner guard stripes, or a series of bands that flank the main border on each side. These multiple borders usually incorporate repeated motifs, such as flowers, stars, or geometric shapes; together, they frame the carpet’s center field, which contains its main pattern or design. This structure underscores the carpet as a kind of window onto other frames of reference, such as the cosmos or the cycle of life. Rather than highlight definitive interpretations for certain symbols or structural elements, Aladağ’s collages invite us to relish in the heterotopic quality of carpets. One way she does this is by playing with the concept of the border itself. In both Wind and Skylight Spring , for example, Aladağ employs long strips of carpet that appear to have once been part of a guard stripe; they display repeated flower designs, triangular and diamond shapes, and crosses that would likely have been part of a flatwoven rug from Anatolia or the Caucasus. Other border-like pieces display more recognizable designs such as the cloud band, a recurring, horseshoe shaped motif often found in carpets from China, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (Stone 73). Indicative of Aladağ’s collage practice overall, her rearranging of the borders and structural elements of the Oriental carpet changes the way we might traditionally read it. No longer encompassing a central field, fragments of borders gesture toward the constantly shifting frames of reference Aladağ’s collages evoke, depending on the experiences and knowledge each viewer brings to them. As such, Aladağ reminds us that weaving is a living and changing practice, through which symbols can be reinterpreted anew across generations and cultures. On a more general level, Aladağ’s collages remind us of the porousness of borders themselves, which are discursively produced through the paradigms of Orientalism. Indeed, many of the carpet pieces Aladağ selects for her collages feature design elements that are shared across diverse cultures and geographies. In the bottom left corner of Wind , for example, a prominently placed panel in orange, yellow, and grey tones features variations on a “latch hook,” which is a subsidiary motif of a geometric pattern with repeating diamond shapes. The 458 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 latch hook consists of parallel projections with “hooks” at right or acute angles pointed in the same direction, most often arranged around a diamond or medallion, or on the edge of a broad stripe, as in a border (Stone 172). While the latch hook is often traced to the flatwoven carpets of the Lurs, or the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now Southwest Iran, it is also widely use in Anatolian kilims. Given how little we know about the Lurs, this motif could easily have originated in the woven rugs of Turkic tribes before migrating into Luri weaving practices (Ford 212). Peter F. Stone also notes the prominence of latch hooks in the broad, zig-zag borders of Kazak rugs produced in nineteenth-century Borjalou in the Caucasus (51). Notably, there is no definitive or symbolic meaning attached to the latch hook design. Comparing it rather to a musical motif, Ford notes the wealth of opportunities the latch hook offers weavers for elaboration and creative interpretation, both within and across cultural borders (213). Through the overall composition of Aladağ’s collages - which evoke the patterns of Wright’s windows - the widespread motif of the latchhook in the Middle East and the Caucasus comes into contact with the American Midwest. These regions are brought together through the compositional elements of Wind as well. While Wind incorporates several straight lines radiating outward from the center left of the collage, its title evokes the unruly character of a natural phenomenon - air that is capable of fluidly streaming over, under, and around any given object or space. Together, the naturally inspired title and composition of Aladağ’s collage recall the wild sumac-inspired windows Wright created for the Susan Laurence Dana House in 1902-1904. In multiple variations throughout the house, Wright represented the natural, unruly, and asymmetrical character of this plant through geometric pattern. The sumac windows are also an excellent example of the significance of framing for Wright’s design practice and his understanding of windows as screens. One of the largest and most ambitious Prairie-style houses Wright built, the Dana house contains 250 windows in total. Rendered geometrically through a chevron motif in warm-toned orange and yellow glass, the sumac blossom is featured throughout the house, including in the Dana house’s reception room, the gallery, and the dining room bay (Sloan 70). Calling attention to Wright’s use of asymmetrical patterns, which mimic the natural growth of a tree or bush, Thomas Heinz notes the “organic” quality of the window designs in the Dana house (37). In the dining bay in particular, one can look out through Wright’s geometrically patterned sumac windows onto the wild sumac bushes surrounding the house. Windows thus connect the house to the outside world, without rendering the border between inside and outside invisible. Wright’s conception of the sumac windows as a kind of framing device is central to his pioneering reconfiguration of space in modern architecture. Where- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 459 as traditional interiors featured clearly defined and compartmentalized rooms, Wright envisioned buildings as open and interconnected totalities. By treating interior partitions like screens or panels, as opposed to impermeable walls, his designs allowed for a newfound sense of spatial continuity. Notably, Wright’s emphasis on continuity was not limited to the interior of a building; on the contrary, he was highly attentive to the relationship between buildings and their surrounding environments. Accordingly, he also envisioned exterior walls as screens with long expanses of windows (De Long 14). Whereas Wright initially saw windows as a challenge to his architectural design, and even lamented the need to cut “holes” into his buildings, by 1920 he had come to understand glass as a “miracle,” a “jewel,” and a “super material” (qtd. in Sloan 43). Indeed, intricately designed windows quickly became a signature aspect of Wright’s architectural design, and it is primarily through windows that Wright allowed his buildings to open out to the outside world (De Long 14). 9 Commenting especially on Wright’s earlier window designs, often referred to as Prairie Style, Jason De Long notes the importance of pattern to Wright’s overall approach. By the early twentieth century, architectural advancements had already made it possible to incorporate large panels of undivided glass into modern building designs (De Long 18). Wright was not fond of this approach, in which windows serve as invisible membranes, offering uninterrupted views of an exterior vista. By endowing windows with patterns, he treated them rather like visible screens. While connecting inside and outside, patterned windows remain visible, creating a frame through which to view the outside world. Notably, Aladağ does ultimately frame her collages within a simple black border. Barely thicker than the cording separating each individual piece in a given work, however, this external frame mimics the practice of collage itself. Like Wright’s windows, which emphasize a dynamic relationship between inside and outside, Aladağ’s collages enact a series of temporal, geographic, and discursive juxtapositions that ask viewers to rethink the relationship of categorical binaries. In the examples I have discussed here, Aladağ’s present moment comes into contact with Wright’s turn-of-the-century. Through their place within the larger Social Fabric series and their particular design elements, Wind and Skylight Spring also bring Wright’s architectural visions for the modern American house into contact with the discourse surrounding the Oriental carpet. In doing so, these collages force us to rethink Orientalist assumptions about “Eastern” versus “Western,” and modern versus traditional cultural and artistic practices. Without collapsing these categories, Aladağ’s collages ask us rather to reflect on the production of borders and border concepts themselves, all while fostering a different mode of engaging with textiles as art pieces. By displaying her DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 460 Kristin Dickinson collages on the wall, Aladağ evokes the Orientalist practice of carpet gazing, as reproduced in the many Orientalist paintings that display carpets like tapestries on a wall or hung from a balcony. In doing so, Aladağ nevertheless invites us to rethink the scopic regime of Orientalism, which attributes value to Eastern objects only when viewed by a discerning Western eye. In contrast to Orientalist viewing practices, which necessarily posit an insurmountable temporal distance between contemporary Western viewers and Oriental art objects relegated to the past, Aladağ’s collages challenge us to rethink textiles as dynamic processes whose meanings continue to be worked out even after their production has seemingly come to an end. Notes 1 Carpets are discussed in volume 1. 2 Additional academic collaborators for the exhibit included art historian Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl, the Orientalist Arnold Nöldeke, and historian of Iranian and Islamic art Ernst Diez (Troelenberg 7). 3 For more on the colonial underpinnings of living history exhibitions, which upheld social and racial hierarchies through their display of indigenous peoples alongside ethnographic objects, see de Matos et. al. 4 The Körber Stiftung offers a 360-degree virtual tour of the stone carpet: https: / / koerber-stiftung.de/ en/ projects/ the-oriental-stone-tapestry/ 5 UNESCO describes the uniformity of the neighborhood’s neo-Gothic architecture simply as a result of “rapid growth in international trade” at the time of its construction between 1885 and 1927. 6 Anything above 330 KPSI is considered to be very good quality. 7 For a similar definition of collage, see Higgins 26. 8 Sloan also notes the significance of other elements of the Froebel system - such as sticks, quadrangular and triangular tablets, and rings - for Wright’s window designs in general. 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