BLOODY RUG

Bloody Rug transforms a domestic textile into a possible silent record of violence. The deep red carpet, marked and stained, absorbs the trace of conflict without illustrating it. Mutu’s gestures are circular stains impressed onto the surface—acts of marking rooted in physicality rather than pictorial representation. This approach recalls her early performances, where the body, material, and the trace itself became tools of storytelling. The tension between the carpet’s formal geometry and its internal disarray becomes a metaphor for control and rupture. The work asserts presence in a space where textiles are today peripheral. Installed beneath Domenichino’s The hunting of Diana, it confronts a tradition of gendered spectacle. In the painting, the women are watched by hidden men—an allegory of intrusion. Here, the scene is gone. The image is withheld. Violence is no longer visual—it is structural, embedded, and enduring, held within the surface. As in the painting, the carpet holds tension rather than releases it, transforming silence into a presence that presses against the room.  At once political and intimate, Bloody Rug evokes broader forms of violence, like wars, wounds, and disappearances, carried not in grand gestures, but in what quietly persists.

 

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