modernity by the truckload

This little carpet arrived from Herat the other day. Tradition meets Modernity. Head-on. The (scrambled) text tells us it was made on the 25th in the first month of 1377 (1998), on a “Tuesday” [verb unintelligible] “with laughter” [or "a smile"].  I’m not sure of its proper attribution, some say “Lori Pambak”… What’s really appealing about the representation of the blue truck is its three-dimensionality. Such 3D and isometric projections appear in the earliest war carpets of the 1980s – with some precedents from the 1970s.

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