Prayer, Placement, and Absolution: Peter Hristoff on Islamic Prayer Rugs

«At a recent MetFridays event in the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, I spoke about prayer rugs (seccades)—not as a scholar of the Islamic arts, but as an artist. In 1997 I started a series of drawings based on my assumptions of what people pray for and why they pray. I eventually turned these drawings into a suite of serigraph prints entitled Ten Prayers that I exhibited, in September 1998, at my first one-man show at the Yapi Kredi Cultural Center's Kazim Taskent Gallery in Istanbul. These works then led to a series of larger "rug" pieces done on rice paper, which combined the motifs I was using in my paintings (masks, birds, skulls, stylized flowers, cosmological symbols, and figures) with the formal structure of Anatolian carpets.»

My interest in halis (rugs) and kilims (flat weaves) was a natural connection to the journal-like quality of my work. I was fascinated by the diarist elements in traditional Turkish carpet making—the weaver incorporating events, personal beliefs, hopes, and desires with traditional regional symbols into their work—an approach I incorporated (and still incorporate) into my art making.

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