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I am contemplating the rug: a thick weave of wool, fur, or some synthetic material, that is spread out on the floor, or covers a table, a bench, or a bed, or hangs on the wall. An object that has been woven by hand, or on a loom or some other mechanical and industrial device, fulfilling varying roles in different cultures and religions – anything from a decorative ornament in the home or in a public space, to the surface that precisely frames the worshipper kneeling on it.

I also consider the standard Hebrew word for carpet – shatiaḥ – and it calls to mind its cognates shetaḥ (area, surface), and shitḥiut (superficiality). Can a carpet be treated as something that lies only on the surface? Can we say that a rug encapsulates the notion of superficiality, that is, refraining from delving into the depth of things, not probing, or the absence of essential content?

To avoid these associations that are imposed upon the carpet by dint of its Hebrew linguistic roots, I prefer to use a different Hebrew word, a synonym for shatiaḥ – marvad (rug). As I delight in disassembling and verbally deconstructing that word, I discover its myriad hidden layers: badim (fabrics); dvarim (things); revadim (layers); medabrim (speaking); and even midbar (desert) and yam (sea, west).

Like carpets, rugs are thin weaves that are laid on the floor or hung on a wall, used to cover a table, armchair, or bed, or just for decoration. They, too, are made up of layers of things that cover something. The Hebrew word ribud refers is something made up of several layers or strata, that are placed side by side or on top of one another.

When I gaze at rugs woven by men or women of different cultures, religions, and nationalities, I discern layers within them, that harbor various codes – personal or collective stories that have been packaged up, as though in a colorful, formal, decorative gift wrap. Beyond the decorative aspect – the outer beauty of the rug – I feel as though it also possesses certain semiotics and semantics: stories, or woven content, in the form of signs and symbols, secrets that only those of the same identity, culture, language, religion, or nation are privy to, and can properly decipher.

In other words: rugs talk.

They speak in a visual language of colors and forms, of sizes and patterns, of materials, signs, and symbols. In the rugs’ pictorial language, entire webs of stories can be transmitted through a single sign or set of signs, or by means of a sign that is replicated repeatedly within a modular pattern, that turns it from singular to plural – transmitting a new message. For example, when the sign of a house is repeatedly replicated, it becomes a street, a neighborhood, town, or village. A replicated tree sign becomes a boulevard, grove, or forest. A repeated sign of a sheep becomes a flock – and when coupled with that of a man, the message becomes: A shepherd in the pasture with his flock. A replicated dancing woman becomes a hora (Romanian and Israeli folk dance) or a troupe of dancing girls; a replicated dancing man signifies a dabkeh (a traditional Levantine folk dance) or dancing young men or a wedding dance – and so on. When several signs are placed side by side within a geometric unit of the same background color, they create a complete sentence, or a complex visual story.

Rugs recount ancient stories or myths in concise pictograms, and encapsulate universal codes and local messages. The pictograms they contain are similar in character and style to ancient pictorial writing – such as hieroglyphs, heraldry, or the contemporary design of international traffic signs (at airports, train stations, sports venues, etc.) and stylized emojis on social media.

Merely changing the image background, or the color of the rug, is enough to alter its meaning (e.g., a white figure on black or red background, or a black figure on a white or red background). The positioning of the image on the rug (e.g., a large or small figure, at the center or in the margins, in the outer frame, or in the upper or lower register) also gives it a different meaning or importance.

I set out to discover the “language” of rugs in a quest that began in Israel – among Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Bedouin artists – and ended among Christian artists in Romania.

At the start of this journey, I surmised that the common threads between the works from here and there would be the indefinable threads of the Ottoman Empire, whose legacy still lingers in many carpets that are being woven in the regions that were once under its dominion.  I hypothesized that the conqueror and the conquered, the ruler and the subjects, exchange ideas, objects, foods, attire, signs and symbols – either voluntarily or compulsorily. Would the talking rugs account for how a given sign or symbol of one culture morphs into a sign or symbol in another culture? Did its meaning change as a result, or did it remain unchanged? Are the signs in rugs marks of identity of their creator, who chose the rug as a mode of self-representation? Are the carpets a kind of portable, lightweight, and itinerant platform of “identity discourse” with which (and on which) one carries one’s identity as one travels about? Moreover, what happens to the rug, traditionally woven on a loom or by some other means, as it passes from one artistic medium to another? What are the meanings arising from a painting or a photograph of a rug – or from a brightly lit rug made of colored glass, or presented on a video screen?

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Oriental carpets from India, Persia, Asia Minor, Bukhara, or the Caucasus arrived in various parts of modern-day Romania through merchants who came from the East to trade with the rich cities of the Transylvania principalities, such as Braşov, Sibiu, Mediaș, and others. As a rule, these merchants would present a carpet to the city’s dignitaries, either as a token of gratitude for having arrived safely at their destination, or as a tax or a donation to the host city. These carpets were hung up to adorn the walls of the churches. Many of them hang to this day inside the Black Church of Braşov, or in St. Margaret’s Church in Mediaș, and represent the largest collection of Anatolian carpets outside Turkey.  The daily exposure to the foreign carpets within a public religious structure also allowed local artists to feast their eyes on forms, colors, compositions, signs, and symbols that differed from what they were familiar with locally – and these probably served as inspiration, conscious or otherwise, for their own carpets.

Oriental carpets also arrived in Romania in less benign ways, as well – through the conquest of Dacia (roughly modern-day Romania and Moldova) by the Roman Emperor Trajan in 106 CE, and the invasions and conquests by various peoples, who occupied the fertile lands of the Balkans and the Carpathians in the centuries between the start of the Common Era and the fourteenth century: Tatars, Cumaeans, Pechenegs, Madjars, and Slavs. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire conquered most of the Balkans, and ruled them until the eighteenth century. While the principalities of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia (all regions of Romania today) retained some autonomy, they were nevertheless obliged to become vassal states, and pay taxes.

The occupied Balkan peoples observed their Ottoman occupiers praying on prayer rugs, or covering their horses with rugs and fabrics decorated with various symbols and signs. Regardless of whether the occupiers imposed their culture, religion, language, food, clothing, and customs, or not, these rugs and their imagery surely captivated the eyes of the local population.

A similar phenomenon also occurred in the oft-occupied region that is now the state of Israel. Over the centuries, the various inhabitants of the country were exposed to rugs from the Near and Far East, either because they were situated on the trade route between East and West, or because they were the object of conquest. And so, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, and Bedouin were all exposed to, influenced by, and culturally assimilated Oriental rugs, and incorporated or changed their imagery to suit their needs and narratives of identity.

In this regard, Yuval Noah Harari distinguishes between objective reality (such as gravity) and subjective reality (such as pain), which depends on the individual’s consciousness, emotions, and beliefs. In his view, however, there is also a third type – intersubjective reality, whose existence is contingent upon the communication between many people who share collective belief in an “imagined order” or constructs comprising emotions, values, and identities.  The shared imagination of a group weaves a web of meaning through stories that represent and give meaning to shared ideas, beliefs, and common values. An in-depth look at the images that appear in the rugs woven by artists of different population groups points to the intersubjective reality inherent in their interwoven networks – a web of meaning.

Beside the influence between East and West, occupier and occupied, there is also another way by which rug-making changes, as local past traditions are either fixed or changed, in form or substance, by present-day artists. Such two-pronged influence – either consecrating or renewing tradition – continues to this day. Some carpet weavers repeatedly replicate images that have been passed down through the local tradition (in Romania or in Israel), while others adopt past elements and give them new names, meanings, and contexts. In some instances, they create stylized minimalist modern versions; in others, inspired by postmodern theories, they use them as “empty signs” that are drawn from the shelves of the “supermarket of culture.”

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According to the Romanian-born American ethnologist, Prof. Paul Petrescu, geometric motifs (in carpets) were either created as stylized, abstracted representations of familiar objects in nature, or vice versa: the loom work spontaneously created “shapes” that the people then named after objects that they resembled. Either option, he says, is plausible: 

Things are not simple and clear-cut, because the geometric motifs are also stylized. There are objects whose original form morphs within the stylized image into an abstract form, and can only be recognized by virtue of their names. Reconstructing the process of stylization and abstraction is difficult, sometimes impossible. There are also “boundary cases,” when the image may have been formed either by virtue of the geometrical nature of the loom work, or from the abstraction of a given object in the real world. For example, is the zigzag line in a rug simply the product of the loom’s cross weave, or a distilled representation of a snake? Or does that line – which is solid on one side, and saw-toothed on the other – represent a meaningful farming implement? Or does it perhaps stand for the teeth of a wolf, an image born of a primal fear? We discover the complexity of the styling and abstraction of objects of nature, such as the sun, a common symbol in ancient civilizations, in the shape of diamond-shaped forms that are either spaced apart or intertwined (in fabrics from Oltenia), or in rhombuses –known as “wheels” – that appear sequentially, in a linear structure, across the entire surface of a carpet. In Romanian rugs we also see highly stylized versions of various images that are echoes of other great cultures: the Tree of Life in its Persian form; the dove as the symbol of the soul from the Christian East; a pair of lions, facing each other next to a tree, from Persian art; the snake as a holy symbol in Egypt, etc. There are also similarly stylized Slavic and North German motifs, such as a goddess holding a sheaf of wheat, or a line of women and/or men holding hands, found in rugs from Maramureș and Moldova, which are identical to those in rugs from Scandinavia or Eastern Prussia.” 

The ethnographer Dr. Georgeta Stoica classified, defined, and interpreted the types, functions, and styles of rugs according to the various regions of Romania. As she elaborates, the name given to a woolen weave varies according to the intended purpose and placement of the rug (i.e., on the wall, floor, or to cover a table or bed). It also varies according to the form, ornament, technique, and region in which it was created. Since the rugs of each region of Romania reflect its particular history and the impact of the cultures that passed through it over time, each rug label in her book also has appended to it both the generic name of the carpet and the local term.  In addition, as Stoica points out, 

Carpets, with their various forms and uses, were transmitted from one generation to another. Woven in workshops of domains, monasteries or in modest peasants’ houses, they enriched and adorned palaces, manors, merchants’ and peasants’ houses. The perfection reached by weavers in mastering the craft is the result of a long practice, which allowed a deep knowledge of the possibilities provided by used materials, the permanent enrichment of working techniques, an understanding of the subtlety of color combinations and their importance in the organization of the compositional space. In time, carpets grew more and more relevant thanks to their artistic qualities, intrinsic value and their representation role. Consequently, beginning from the eighteenth century, carpets started to be mentioned in the dowry papers of the daughters of prosperous families, in the documents of charity to churches, monasteries or in wills, which contributed in obtaining precious information on the development of the craft, of names and decorative compositions.  

Furthermore, she notes,

Many decorative motifs encountered on carpets have remote origins, proving their long travel through Eastern or Western civilizations. Grafted on an ancestral background and marked by a personalized interpretation, some of these weaving or ornamentation techniques, decorative motifs and compositions were organically integrated in timeinto the native style of carpets. However, we must not omit the fact that the use of a certain type of tools also requires the achievement of a certain type of decorative motifs. … The interpretation manner of motifs is closely connected with techniques used, with the period in which carpets were woven, which are relevant to the understanding of a certain, specific aesthetic vision. …The ornamentation alphabet of the carpets … incorporate both the primary signs of linear, straight, and curved motifs, the laying “S,” “X,” diamonds, simple, jagged or with hooks; stylized images of plants, birds, or human beings; and also the motifs that are famous for their universal meaning – the Tree of Life, the Cross, etc. … Each of these “signs,” simple or elaborate, constituting a universal language with magic and religious connotations, became – by losing their sacral character or by slipping into oblivion – mere decorative elements artfully woven on carpets that are nowadays adorning the interior of peasant houses. 

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In the past twenty years, I have noticed a growing phenomenon of artists, who see rugs and their imagery as symbols that encapsulate their national, religious, gender, or cultural identity, and choose to tell their personal, family, ethnic, religious or national narratives through tapestries that they weave, or through images of rugs that they paint or record in still photographs or in video. They also “translate” carpet imagery into enduring media, such as stained glass, wooden inlays, or wood carving. The artistic recasting of the rug in other media or materials changes contexts, disrupts previous meanings, and suggests new, critical, or political implications.

The exhibition Talking Rugs presents this rich spectrum of multilayered endeavors through the works of several contemporary artists from Israel and Romania. It is not an overview, but rather suggests a trend and points at a fascinating artistic and cultural phenomenon, which reflects the positive outcomes that occur when bridges are formed between cultures in an era of growing national and religious isolationism.

The traditional medium of weaving carpets by hand on a loom is disappearing in favor of rugs that are woven by means of computer software and hardware. Will it survive in future, or is this exhibition effectively a requiem for the handmade carpet? Only time will tell.