Pattern Matching  2016/2015/2012/2010

Pattern Matching brings together the seemingly disparate subjects of basketball, the famous American athletic export, and Oriental carpets, probably the most successful commercial product in the world that originates from the Middle East. Setting differences aside, lets consider these two incommensurable categories - the game and the object of everyday use - as two cultural expressions, in order to make the matching of their respective patterns possible and productive. Aladağ densely filled her carpets with a collage of ornamentation while respecting the lines and color fields that define the borders and mark important points on a basketball court. The artist proposes that we consider such patterns in the widest possible sense, going beyond their visual appearance: thus, they conjure conflicting patterns of behavior, opposing lifestyles and mutually exclusive rules that give shape to social and political realities of our supposedly globalized world and its distinctly local manifestations. By overlapping or “matching” the patterns that belong to different semantic orders - that of the “Western” game and the “Oriental” ornament - Aladağ produces a soft clash of meanings. The resulting hybrid objects, made of cut-out parts of existing carpets that are produced anywhere from Maghreb to China, Germany to Iraq, serve as evidence of conflicting ways of being and reveal patterns that don't match: mass event versus domesticity, action versus leisure, professional athletic games dominated by men versus women's domestic work, entertainment (as a secular religion) versus religion itself, the US versus the “rogue” states (that produce carpets) and perhaps even war versus peace... Each carpet displays a unique composition of colors and ornament, though the basic linear structure on which the colors and patterns are laid out remains the same for each piece. Meanings change, it seems, but the patterns still match, somehow. (excerpt from the text by Adam Szymczyk)