Christopher Joshua Benton has just unveiled his largest installation to date: A sprawling public plaza in the heart of Abu Dhabi. This project, “Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home,” commissioned by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) for the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, is an impressive feat, covering an area larger than a football pitch and incorporating thousands of meters of specially colored astroturf designed to mimic a gigantic carpet. Unlike traditional public art installations that may prioritize aesthetic or symbolic representation, Benton’s approach is deeply rooted in community engagement and active participation—the project was an 8-month collaboration with the local merchants who live and work in the historic Carpet Souk market— making this public park a dynamic center for social interaction and cultural celebration.
“I’d rather make a project with a community than for one,” Benton explains, highlighting his philosophy of collaboration over creation. His experience at MIT and Harvard, studying socially engaged art and co-teaching public art classes, provided him with a robust framework for this project. “When the (Public Art Abu Dhabi) Biennial team reached out to me, I already had a framework in mind,” he says. “It was two-fold: I wanted to help bring resources to a place that could use it, that maybe had been a bit neglected by the city. The other guiding principle is that the place had to have a built-in community, one who could become collaborators.”
The project’s inception was marked by a straightforward yet impactful approach: involving the local merchants from the beginning. “Our first question to the merchants was a simple one: ‘What do you imagine here?’ And luckily, our hunch was right,” Benton shares. This approach not only ensured that the community’s voice was heard but also that their vision was integral to the conceptual development of the plaza. This ethos is further inspired by Tania Bruguera’s concept of “Arte Útil,” or useful art, where art functions as a tool for social change and community empowerment.
Throughout the process, Benton and his team engaged in over 100 one-on-one interviews with merchants and majlis listening sessions, capturing a wide array of personal stories and aspirations which directly influenced the plaza’s design. One particularly memorable story came from Wali Khan, a local merchant whose connection to his homeland inspired one of the plaza’s key elements. “My favorite story is what we call ‘1001 Apples,’ which is an ode to Wali Khan, a man who owns a carpet shop in the market. He told us that his favorite thing to do when he returns to Afghanistan is to have a bite of apple from his orchard. He even sent us some TikToks of his home: he really has over a thousand apple trees,” Benton recalls fondly.
Another story that shaped the final design came from Mohamad Hassan, a young merchant with ambitious plans for his future. “In our first workshop, my team and I laid out these giant 20-meter rolls of paper down the arched corridors of the market, where sometimes forty guys would make sketches based off our prompts,” Benton describes. “That’s when we met Hassan. He walked over and told us nonchalantly, ‘I don’t need your money. Come to my shop. I’m the best illustrator here.’ So we had a private 1-on-1 with him and he created the most beautiful drawing of his city. At the center of his urban scene was this incredible building that he said would be his future family office with a penthouse at the top.”
The technical elements of creating such a massive public work were impressive. The “carpet” itself required 3,000 meters of hand-cut astroturf, laid out to cover the expansive area of the plaza. The production process involved 18,000-man hours and the efforts of 40 construction workers, emphasizing the scale and intensity of the undertaking. To secure the astroturf, 800 gallons of the world’s strongest adhesive were used, along with 5 tons of steel to support the intricate design elements and structures within the plaza. Furthermore, a custom color of astroturf was formulated to approximate skin tones, a detail that highlights the project’s intent to reflect the diverse community it serves. The astroturf is complete with pavilions, seating, shade structures, and a viewing tower, and will play host to a robust public program of concerts, talks, and workshops curated by Benton through April.
Benton’s proximity to the site—his studio is just a five-minute walk away—allowed him to be deeply involved in the daily execution of the project. Over eight months, Benton immersed himself in the life of the souk, forging relationships with the merchants and integrating their stories and feedback into the design. This close interaction ensured that the project remained grounded in the community’s heritage and contemporary life.
Featuring a series of cascading valleys, each representing a unique story from the market, including the stories of Wali and Hassan, “Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home” serves as a striking counternarrative to the traditional Afghan war carpets, instead offering a vision of homeland and peace through a playful, pixelated style reminiscent of 1980s kilim weaving. “If a war carpet is a record of terror, then a homeland carpet is a record of peace. I think personal testimony, sharing our own stories, and being able to see the other as clearly as possible—this sort of fragility is the antidote to the type of dehumanization that allows the public to accept the violence of the state,” he stated.
The collaboration extended beyond the local community to include Cutwork Studio, based in Paris, which was instrumental in realizing the technical aspects of the design. Despite the geographical distance, the design process was a model of modern collaboration, largely facilitated by technology. “Cutwork is based in Paris, so most of our meetings happened on Zoom. This enabled us to have even more design interface with the merchants. Every time we met with Cutwork, we brought along and paid people from the market, too, which allowed us to get immediate and often surprising feedback,” Benton notes. “At one point, Gwen from Cutwork was 3D modeling live on SketchUp to mock-up some of the merchant’s ideas. It was all quite radical.”
Reflecting on the completion of the plaza, Benton hopes that it will serve not just as a physical space, but as a catalyst for continued community engagement and a model for future projects. “I hope it creates a model where those in power trust the community’s imagination in creating new relations that increase everyone’s access to the city,” he muses, contemplating the broader impact of the project.
This project is semi-permanent, set to remain on-site for at least three years, during which Benton hopes it will significantly impact the merchants, visitors, and the broader Abu Dhabi community. “The Abu Dhabi Carpet Souk is a protected heritage site and is the vision of the founder of the country, Sheikh Zayed,” he explains. Despite the relocation plans for the souk, Benton dreams that his project will demonstrate enough cultural and social value to warrant the preservation of the market’s current location. “It’s a beautiful new building—and it’s great that the city acknowledges the importance of the carpet merchants to make such an investment. At the same time, one must wonder: where will the shopkeepers live when the new market has no housing? What happens to the culture of a community when you take away the communal and spatial relationships that facilitate their labor?” Benton questions, highlighting the deeper implications of urban redevelopment.
“My absurd dream is that this project becomes popular enough so that the market that surrounds it can remain in place,” he elaborates. “My other hope is for the project to be a model for more socially-engaged art practices in the region—so that institutions start to believe that maybe artists can be partners in dreaming up new possibilities and futures for the city. It’s important that artists and communities are empowered to draft up their own solutions to civic problems.”
Benton’s approach, which integrates the voices and visions of local merchants, stands in stark contrast to more traditional public art installations that might utilize local cultures merely as a backdrop or treat community members as pawns in a larger aesthetic narrative. It’s refreshing and profoundly impactful to see Benton not only include but prioritize the merchant’s insights and experiences, truly seeing them as people with rich histories and dreams.
Looking back on his artistic journey and how this project connects with his previous work, the artist shares a story that shows how his fundamental approach has stayed the same but has naturally evolved over time: “A few years ago, I was doing a residency in Dubai. At the time, I was making these kind of silly quilts that were constructed from construction worker vests. So one night, around 1 A.M., a friend and I were playing Nicki Minaj music really loud with the studio doors wide open. Surely you could have heard the music from blocks away. That’s when two men appeared—both were wearing the same exact vests and colored uniforms that we were quilting. The two men were construction workers who were renovating the art gallery next door. I don’t think they knew Nicki Minaj so well but we all danced together for about 6 songs until they had to go back to work. The next day at the same exact time, they returned just as I was closing the studio up. They wanted to dance but I was flying out the next morning.
“In this moment, I felt that the symbolic-identitarian gesture in art was impotent—or at least my attempts at it. In this moment, I felt that a potential way out was to create spaces like that night in Al Quoz: a place for joy, self-expression, and conviviality. So instead of making polemic art pointing at issues—maybe it’s more productive to try to think through ways of support and mutual aid and fun. This is to say, the ethics, aesthetics, and storytelling of my work has remained the same, but I hope my approach is becoming more participatory, communal, and socially engaged.”
Main image: Photographed by Ron John
