Flying Carpets

From the legendary stories of King Solomon to One Thousand and One Nights and Hollywood’s Thief of Baghdad (1924), the image of the flying carpet has entered popular imagination as one of the most universally recognized symbols of the Orient. Flying carpets describe a boundless and unrestricted mode of travel and freedom. It is this characteristic that interests the artist in relation to the carpets used by hawkers who sell counterfeit goods on the streets of Venice. In stark contrast to the freedom embodied by the symbol of the flying carpet, the mobility of the street sellers is greatly restricted.

Of mainly African, Arab, or South Asian descent, the peddlers also use their carpets to bundle together their goods in order to flee from the authorities. Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s installation gives expression to the socio-political predicament of the hawkers. In her work, geometric metal forms, derived from stencil outlines of the hawkers’ carpets, are suspended by cascades of hanging thread. Hovering in space like a floating cage, the work takes the shape of a bridge, Il Ponte del Sepolcro in Venice, where the artist spent an eight-day period documenting the activities of the street sellers. With beauty and fragility, the work underlines what is, in effect, a day-to-day sense of confinement experienced by the hawkers as they clandestinely “move” from place to place.

– Sharmini Pereira, “Nadia Kaabi-Linke – Flying Carpets, in Footnote to a Project – The 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Dubai, 2011, p. 314.

Excerpt from Sara Raza, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, Vol. 3: Middle East and North Africa (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2016), p. 23.

The critical value of smuggling is an important component of But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, which frames it as an alternative cultural barometer and bargaining tool and subverts illicit tactics ordinarily associated with smuggling to tease out a subterranean truth. Although ordinarily considered a negative term, the word smuggling itself signals a useful perspective on the study of hidden or underground cartographies, a viewpoint supported by the writings of theorist Simon Harvey.

In his essay, “Smuggling the State into Transgression” (2006), Harvey argues: “in the register of material contraband [the] goods are often directly relevant to visual culture and to alternative legal mapping of smuggling.”¹¹ This view is based on the writer’s research into the various methodologies of mapping and into smuggling as an alternative economy, which he interprets as a labyrinth of diverse anthropological, ethnographic, and mythological influences. In the MAP exhibition, smuggling provides value and currency to such terms as hidden, shadow, and unrecorded.¹²

Smuggling is reconsidered as a metaphor for the mapping of origins by several artists in the exhibition, in work that reveals and employs methodologies of representation associated with cartography and its heritage. One example is Tunisian-born artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s probing of the impact of increased illegal migration from Africa into Europe following the Arab Spring, whereby young men are “smuggled” across the Mediterranean into Spain and Italy, lured by the promise of prosperity. Kaabi-Linke’s sculpture Flying Carpets (2011, pp. 66–67) reflects the disparity of wealth that plagues illegal immigrants who have undertaken dangerous and expensive journeys only to find themselves serving the needs of the black market.

Young immigrants arrive at the shores of Europe in cramped containers and boats, a rather less exotic mode of transport than the flying carpet rides that became a popular Oriental fantasy in eighteenth-century Europe following the wide circulation of French and English translations of The Thousand and One Nights.

To research Flying Carpets, Kaabi-Linke spent eight days observing immigrant street traders in Venice who display their counterfeit goods on rugs that can be easily moved should the authorities descend unexpectedly (see figs. 4–6). She then measured the carpets and the Ponte del Sepolcro bridge near which the traders congregate and sell their wares, producing a full-scale reworking of them in the form of intricate steel frames suspended from the ceiling. The shadows that these structures cast resemble the bars of a cage, hinting at the restriction and confinement routinely experienced by stateless and undocumented immigrants.

Kaabi-Linke’s work thus not only pays homage to these individuals, who represent a hidden, uncounted majority; it also presents an example of geometric consciousness, which embodies what Harvey characterizes as “informal mappings, new angles, minor ethnographies and shipwrecked narratives [that] are very useful para-doxa not only to hegemonic law, but also to overtly rigid definitions of transgression.”¹³