Imperial Threads: The Artist’s Reflection
By Artist-In-Residence Laurelie Rae
In 2017, the idea for the Imperial Threads workshop was berthed alongside my work as a museum educator at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Their annual exhibition by the same name was an impressively curated collection of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal art and artifacts that demonstrated the links between the empires. Miniature painting, jewelry, ceramics, and calligraphy were all put on display, but it was the carpets and textiles that captivated me the most. I could map the overlapping motifs from place to place within the carpets and textiles, following Tabrizi motifs that would appear on the Iznik tile panels. Iznik motifs carved onto the Mughal Lahore fort iwans. To exhaust all the ways the creative exchanges occurred between empires would be too difficult a task. Imperial Threads plays on the idea of the threads that connect us, ideas, empires and so forth. It is also a colloquial term for clothing, which is the main source of inspiration for the course.
Clothing has been used historically to express our allegiance, tastes, personalities, and tribal or ethnic affiliations and used for spiritual expression and protection. These garments may clothe our bodies but they also reveal the stories about where we are from, our values, and the culture(s) we are surrounded by. These narratives are precious relics of our human existence revealing the places of overlap and our humanity. Through Imperial Threads I wanted to map culture, religion, war, colonization, and our collective Muslim history through clothing, through the threads that make up the cloth and hold the motifs and patterns that represent us.
The art workshop series guided participants throughout the expanse of the Islamic empire focusing on the Mughals, Safavids, Ottomans, West African indigo dyed fabric from Tuba, Palestinian Tatreez, Uzbek Doppi and early Islamic Tiraz. Learning motifs, patterns, and the history that contextualizes the Imperial Threads allows the participant to weave their own connections, narratives, and understanding. Participants are encouraged to create their own narratives instead of falling back on the tropes common in the museum and academia surrounding the discourse on Islamic Art. In curating and teaching Imperial Threads I wanted to open up a discussion on the Islamic Art historical canon. By including art, culture, empires, and techniques not normally included in the canon we can begin to put together a more representative idea of what Islamic Art is. As the participants handle the visual course material, creating their own patterns, they are able to create their own meaningful connections with the patterns, and experience, in time replacing the outdated tropes so common to the field of study.
Having the chance to teach Imperial Threads at the IGP has been a great opportunity to put these ideas and theories into practice. Working within the museum system can make it hard to evaluate the Islamic Art canon but in my experienc, there are many tropes that are being parrotted to museum visitors that are opposite of what values are followed in Islam and have informed/ inspired this art form. These tropes are easily negated with evidence in art form and artifact that has been left out of the cannon. “Imperial Threads” has been an exercise in expanding the cannon to write the real story. I thank Takhayul Project, the IGP, and UCL as well as Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu for allowing me the chance to create these important stories with the workshop participants. I hope to continue this work academically and artistically in the future.