Untitled (table piece) by Ward Alkhalaf from the “The Magic Carpet” series, it’s a 110x180cm hand-crocheted cotton yarn, 2023

on show June 10-13, 2024

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The Magic Carpet:
A series of textile works and art interventions in textile artisan communities tracing collective experiences and their influence on artisanal practices. The project delves into the interplay of memory by exploring Syrian heritage, traditional visual language, and symbolism of daily objects. Through various textile forms from crochet, embroidery, weaving, and block printing, the work-in-progress questions the nexus between social classes and kitsch, how social differences have shaped –and been shaped by— collective popular taste(s), it dwells on their influence on identity through mass-market and elitist modes of aesthetics, and collective visual memory(s) that shapes current culture, furthermore, addressing the relationship between traditional and contemporary expressions from an approach where the totalitarian invades the private realms.
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Ward Alkhalaf (Damascus, 1995) is an artist and designer exploring practices around collective memory, craftsmanship, and cultural heritage through interdisciplinary projects spanning design, textile art, illustration, and archiving. He navigates through these work modes by crafting narratives that intertwine the transformative potential of craftsmanship with the multifaceted dynamics of socio-political and economic environments, aiming to challenge the stereotypical perceptions of craft practices and their changing roles.