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In Fabricating Authenticity, Ruhee Maknojia traces the history of the Ardabil Carpets, a pair of monumental Persian rugs woven in the 16th century. Maknojia invites viewers to question how institutions manufacture authenticity and how narratives are constructed through display.

Created as twins for the shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili, the carpets embodied symmetry and spiritual reflection. Their paired existence was essential to their meaning, rooted in Persian traditions where twinning signifies harmony, ethical order, and relational thought. 

By the late 19th century, the shrine and the carpets had deteriorated. They were eventually acquired by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where one carpet was restored using fragments from its twin. This act severed their relationship as a pair, enabling the museum to present a single, seemingly intact masterpiece while obscuring the extensive reconstruction that made it possible. Such practices functioned as instruments of soft power.

The fragmented twin disappeared from public view for decades, its history entangled with covert agreements involving the CIA, MI6, and wartime fundraising efforts. Now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, its damaged condition exposes how cultural objects are reshaped to serve geopolitical and ideological interests.

Fabricating Authenticity responds to this history by restoring the logic of twinning without attempting repair or completion. Mirrored rug forms throughout the exhibition echo the central motif of the original Ardabil design, using reflection as a method of inquiry. Rather than offering a singular artifact, Maknojia foregrounds fracture, duplication, and loss as historical facts. Ornament here becomes a critical language through which power operates, revealing how aesthetic decisions can shape cultural memory.

In doing so, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider what preservation means, whose histories are made visible, and how art participates in the ongoing construction of power.

More information here.