Battleground:War Rugs from

Afghanistan 

The terror of bombs falling from the sky and landmines exploding from the earth is revealed in Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan,

Through three decades of international and civil war, Afghans have borne witness to disaster by weaving unprecedented images of battle and weaponry into their rugs. This exhibition presents 63 rugs that tell the story of the Afghan world turned upside down.
Modern warfare came to Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion of 1979. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a decade of civil war piled disaster on top of catastrophe. Now the global war on terrorism continues to fill the land and the sky of Afghanistan with the machinery of war.
As they have always done, Afghans depict on their rugs what they see and what matters most to them. Over three decades of chaos, the customary flowers on rugs have turned into bullets, or landmines, or hand grenades. Birds have turned into helicopters and fighter jets. Landscapes have filled up with field guns and troop carriers. Sheep and horses have turned into tanks.
Certain rugs were the work of weavers in refugee camps (Afghan refugees total 4 million, the largest refugee population in the world) but little is known of the makers themselves. Questions also surround the sentiment of the rugs. Are war rugs pro-war or anti-war? It is difficult to tell what a rug is supposed to mean when its history is hidden and its maker unknown. What is available are the rugs themselves – eloquent anonymous documents about life in an ancient land that has exploded.

Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan is curated by Max Allen and circulated by the Textile Museum of Canada.