On Wednesday, I went to see “Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia” at the Memorial Art Gallery along with my parents and my daughter. The exhibition “brings to the United States, for the first time, examples from distinguished private collections of Afghan war rugs. The artists who wove them, mostly women, abandoned their traditional nonfigurative styles to produce rich pictorial images that recount a more current cultural story. Maps, weapons, army tanks, and portraits of kings, khans, and military leaders are among the new motifs that began appearing in otherwise traditional carpets in the 1970s and proliferated after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and again following the post-September 11 intervention by the United States.”
I was particularly interested in this exhibition because “war rugs” are featured in my first film The Muslims I Know, when we talk about the channeling of money and weapons into Afghanistan in the 1980s by Saudi Arabia and the US, through the Pakistani military regime, in order to push back the Soviets.
The exhibit shows the evolution of themes and patterns in rug weaving from helicopters appearing earlier on as semi machine, semi tulip-like flower, grenades arranged into a regular rug motif along with Cyrillic text, to completely modern cityscapes and powerful political statements about American drones and military violence (weapons being parceled out of Uncle Sam’s hat).
As we were leaving the exhibit, talking about unending war in Afghanistan and its seepage into culture and day to day life, my mom made a good point. She found it offensive for Americans to have funded a war in Afghanistan, ignored the civil war that followed, then installed their own brutal occupation, only to indulge in analyzing the impact of this decades-long violence through art exhibits like these. Indeed.