61. Biennale Arte – Padiglione Azerbaijan

Comunicato stampa

At this year's Venice Art Biennale, Azerbaijan presents The Attention, a solo exhibition of new works by Faig Ahmed, curated by Gwendolyn Collaço (currently at Brown University, formerly MIT and LACMA). Installed across seven interconnected rooms at Campo della Tana, near the Arsenale, the exhibition transforms the historic rope-making complex into an immersive environment that reimagines the traditional Azerbaijani carpet as a coded surface—bridging craft, metaphysics, and computational logic.

The exhibition unfolds as a journey from external noise toward inward contemplation, echoing the Sufi concept of fana—the dissolution of the self—as a path to renewed awareness. Upon entering, visitors encounter the central installation, I Can Contain Both Worlds but I Do Not Fit Into This One (2026), a continuous carpet that spans the pavilion as a “breathing body,” spilling, knotting, and climbing the architecture. As the journey progresses, the material language of the carpet gradually dissolves, giving way to more abstract systems of meaning. The presentation culminates in Entropy Altar (2026), which uses a quantum random number generator (QRNG)—a technology widely used in cybersecurity—to translate subatomic randomness into evolving language shaped in part by visitor presence.

Known for his distorted textile works, Ahmed here extends his practice into a broader inquiry into how meaning is generated, drawing a parallel between Imadaddin Nasimi’s Hurufi mysticism—where letters and codes structure the universe—and contemporary quantum physics, where reality is understood as emerging through interpretation, interaction, and attention.