2 Apr - 2 May, 2022
Ali Dadgar’s Rugs series is an ongoing body of work produced over more than a decade. This series continues Dadgar’s exploration of cultural hegemonies, representation, and human relationships to systems of meaning approached through his Iranian and American experiences. His point of departure is the Persian rug, which he problematizes, observing it as a vehicle of memory intimately linked to his childhood yet also as an international symbol of political unrest and bourgeois society tainted with associations to child labor. Long inspired by Iranian weaving traditions, Dadgar emancipates the Persian Rug from its decorative and functional purposes by way of dematerialization and recontextualization. ///
Consistent with past works, Dadgar interferes with the surfaces of his symbolically charged materials – from the dictionary page to maps and rugs. Through a process of silk screen printing and stenciling, he reconfigures them, heightening the fragility of their fixed meaning. As a metaphor for the patterns in our lives, Dadgar’s purposeful erasure of the patterns on the rug disrupts the logical order, pointing to the instability of the value systems that shape our routines. As their design and traditional motifs transform beneath layers of thick paint and encrusted inks, the artist seeks to challenge dominant systems of meaning and in the context of the Persian rug, he interrogates the cultural value attributed to it.