Consciousness in Flux
Date:
Saturday 17 Feb, 2024
-
Thursday 01 Aug, 2024
Time:
10:00 a.m.
-
07:00 p.m.
Venue:
Block E, 3rd Floor, Maraya Art Centre, Al Qasba,
Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates
Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed is renowned for his conceptual hand-woven artworks that utilise the traditional decorative craft of carpet making, transforming them into visually tantalising contemporary pieces. These carpets are embedded within a vast, century-long history that involves techniques passed down from generation to generation.
The artist’s carpets reimagine conventional techniques, resulting in multifaceted, dynamic artworks by breaking boundaries and deconstructing traditional formulas. Every carpet has a traditional and a contemporary element; one is stable, and the other is constantly in flux.
The newly commissioned artwork Consciousness in Flux brings this dichotomy to another, broader level and investigates another dimension in Faig Ahmed's most current, research-based work that explores the physiological and psychological mechanisms of perception.
The newly created work asks a fundamental question: 'How do we perceive art?'. By doing so, it unravels the intricacies of art's impact on the human experience via a data-driven head device that measures a visitor’s brain activity in real-time. The brain’s response to artistic stimuli, namely the surrounding works on display by Faig Ahmed, is recorded here. These carpets lie in a dark space between two projections on either side of the gallery space. Visitors are asked to participate and put on a headset while viewing the works, thereby witnessing an accurate recording of their brain activity when observing his art.
The patterns describing the visitors’ brainwave activities are generated by including data from EEG, ECG, EMG and eye-tracking technologies. The resulting data waves - that very much resemble the intricate weavings of carpets - result from the interaction between the viewer and the artworks. This exploration between mind and matter explores an unknown territory of neuroscience and art, offering a deeper understanding of the profound connection between perception and reality.
