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.

I began to work on rug-inspired prints a few years later, in which I would, on a daily basis, complete a horizontal band of the composition that recorded my interests, personal mythologies, and artistic preoccupations. I always had the intention of eventually creating actual halis and kilims in Turkey, as the notion of the seccade (prayer rugs) particularly fascinated me—an object that creates a sacred space wherever it is placed, and is charged with hope and spiritual connections as well as a physical relationship to the body and geography.

The ritual of placement, prayer, and absolution all tap into issues I have been addressing in my work since the early 1980s, which make the seccade—an object of contemplation and decoration—an obvious focus in my work. I am interested in “bright sadness,” a term I came upon in the Patriarch Bartholomew’s statement in the exhibition catalogue that accompanied Byzantium: Faith and Power (2004), which most accurately describes my interests. In the publication, Bartholomew writes: “This refers to a mixed emotion of joy, over the anticipated help from God and Salvation, and sorrow, for the suffering of life and sin.” This juxtaposition of the spiritual and the physical, the happy and the sad—mankind’s conflicted nature—continues to be a predominant theme of my work.

Peter Hristoff. Prayer Niche, 2007

Read all blog posts related to Peter Hristoff’s residency at the Met.