Exhibitions
Elysium
Collaboration of Aida Mahmudova and Azerkhalcha | Azerkhalcha Carpet Gallery | Boyuk Qala, 15
Rooted in Aida Mahmudova's Elysium painting series, this exhibition brings selected fragments of her canvases into woven form, where painting is translated into textile and surface becomes structure. Created in collaboration with female artisans in Nardaran, Shamkir, and Guba, the carpets move beyond the idea of the rug as a fixed two-dimensional object, approaching it instead as a tactile and spatial construction. Through layering, enlarged details, and material intervention, Elysium reactivates the historic language of Azerbaijani carpet-making while placing it within a distinctly contemporary artistic framework.
About the Artist: Aida Mahmudova is an artist and patron of the arts in Azerbaijan, and the founder of YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku and CHELEBI, a brand focused on collectible design and décor. A graduate of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, her work explores memory, place, and belonging through painting, sculpture, and installation, and has been exhibited internationally, including in Baku, Rome, Vienna, New York, London, and at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Intertwined Polarities
Exhibition by Xhevahir Kolgjini | Zaman Gallery
In Intertwined Polarities, Xhevahir Kolgjini explores spiritual transformation, psychological tension, and the fragile balance between what persists and what changes. Built through the language of hand-knotted weaving, the works translate lived experience into a woven structure of lines, knots, grids, and pixels, reflecting the artist's long engagement with cultural crossings and clashing civilizations. The exhibition presents textile as both image and thought: a space where sensory, mental, and cultural insights are interlaced into a powerful meditation on coexistence and self-expression.
About the Artist: Xhevahir Kolgjini is an Albanian-American artist trained in painting and fiber arts at the Academy of Arts in Tirana, where he later completed postgraduate studies in art criticism. He has been a lecturer in visual arts at RIT Kosovo since 2004, and his works have been shown internationally in Albania, London, New York, Minneapolis, Texas, and beyond, with works from the Intertwined Polarities series exhibited in recent years in Tirana and New York.
Souls in Motion
Exhibition by Laurine Malengreau | Baku Photography House
Souls in Motion invites viewers into an emotional abstract world shaped by movement, breath, and the energies that pass through body and matter. Working in the rare Nuno Silk technique, Laurine Malengreau creates textile surfaces that feel alive, evoking deep waters, earth, fire, and air in compositions that seem to inhale and exhale before the eye. Her works move inward, toward what is unspoken and unseen, uncovering joy, vulnerability, and transformation through material language.
About the Artist: Laurine Malengreau is a Belgian textile artist based in Aubusson, France, a historic centre of tapestry and contemporary textile art. After studies in art history and experience in cultural management, she trained in Nuno Silk in Madrid and has since developed an internationally recognized practice, receiving major distinctions including the Homo Faber Fellowship, awards from Ateliers d'Art de France and the Gobelins Gallery, and becoming the first artist to enter the permanent collection of the Rothko Museum in Latvia.
Fairy Tales Woven Into Threads — Garabagh Carpets
Collaboration of Farid Rasulov and Azerkhalcha | QGallery
This exhibition reinterprets the delicate nature motifs of the Garabagh carpet school through the visual language of contemporary art. Drawing on flowers, birds, animals, and symbolic imagery once woven in Shusha carpets of the late nineteenth century, Farid Rasulov transforms inherited ornament into vivid, self-contained narratives that connect memory with the present. Preserving traditional hand-weaving, natural wool, and dyeing techniques, Fairy Tales Woven Into Threads presents carpet not only as decorative art, but as a living carrier of cultural memory and a contemporary platform for renewed meaning.
About the Artist: Farid Rasulov is a multidisciplinary artist born in Shusha in 1985, whose work spans painting, installation, sculpture, 3D graphics, and animation. Originally trained as a medical doctor, he emerged as one of the distinctive voices in contemporary Azerbaijani art, representing Azerbaijan at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, with exhibitions in Baku, Istanbul, Sharjah, Dresden, Rome, Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow, Dubai, and New York.
Women of the Turkic Steppe
Exhibition by Assol | Azerkhalcha New Carpet Gallery | Boyuk Qala 44, Baku Khans' Palace Complex
In Women of the Turkic Steppe, Assol reimagines the traditional carpet as a contemporary pictorial surface, using her authorial Carpet Art technique to create striking hyperrealist works on woven ground. Centered on the queens of the Great Steppe, Turkic history, and national ornament, the exhibition brings together portraiture, memory, and decorative heritage in a bold visual language that bridges past and present. Through this transformation, the carpet becomes not only a bearer of tradition, but also a powerful medium for contemporary storytelling.
About the Artist: Assol Alimova is a contemporary Kazakh artist working in her own Carpet Art technique. Her practice is defined by the transformation of traditional carpets into contemporary artworks, and her work has gained wide public recognition, including inclusion in TikTok's The Discover List 2026 and a meeting with the President of Kazakhstan.
