Abstract This article examines Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home, Christopher Joshua Benton's monumental astroturf installation created for Public Matter, the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial (2024–25). Sited in the historic Carpet Souq of Mina Zayed—a marketplace sustained by the long-standing work, craftsmanship, and transnational histories of Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, and Iranian merchants—the installation transforms an everyday commercial corridor into a site of collective storytelling. Developed through an embedded, relational process, the work draws on merchants’ memories of home, present realities, and future aspirations, weaving them into a vivid, collaboratively authored textile. Benton's approach extends his ongoing engagement with power, race, and labor into a methodology aligned with Gayatri Spivak's notion of “critical intimacy,” foregrounding listening, shared authorship, and ethical proximity. The article situates the work within Abu Dhabi's sociohistorical context and the biennial's redefinition of public art as civic and dialogic. It traces Benton's collaborative process—majlis sessions, multilingual exchanges, and iterative drawing—and analyzes how these practices resist extractive modes of representation. Through merchants’ narratives, the carpet becomes a living archive of the souq and a counterpoint to what Achille Mbembe identifies as “necropolitical” structures of visibility. The installation ultimately proposes a model of public art grounded in care, reciprocity, and community stewardship.
Carmen Salah Hassan (Fri,) studied this question.