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Faig Ahmed Weaves Azerbaijan’s Past Into Its Future in Venice

The artist’s immersive Biennale installation at Campo della Tana transforms ages-old carpet traditions into a meditation on consciousness, quantum logic and the country's future.

Azerbaijan seldom registers on the art world’s map; for many, it remains shrouded in mystery, a place whose traditions and symbologies have not yet been colonized by the collective imagination. Yet with the opening of this year’s Venice Biennale, the image it wanted to project with its national pavilion exhibition, “The Attention,” was not just one of a country still tied to centuries-old craft traditions but also as a hub of technological and digital innovation. Installed across seven interconnected rooms at Campo della Tana, near the Arsenale, the works of artist Faig Ahmed transform 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.

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Azerbaijan is currently trying to move its economy beyond oil and gas by developing digital and A.I. infrastructure, supporting startups and space technology and establishing clear innovation policies. Its Digital Economy Development Strategy for 2026-2029 lays out a plan for increasing the sector’s share of GDP and expanding the use of technology across the economy, with 51 initiatives focused on human capital, innovation, business digitization and advanced technologies, including A.I. and blockchain.

National pavilions often reveal interesting things about the future a country envisions and seeks to create through its contemporary artists. In “The Attention,” Ahmed has transformed the carpet into a total organism—something that breathes, collapses, expands and reacts to the viewer. In conversation with Observer, he described the traditional carpet as a form of technology that has accompanied human civilization, an early form of cultural coding that developed a language through making and fibers, in relation to a place. “The carpet in this space guides the viewer, just as it guided our ancestors for thousands of years, along a path that has led........

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