For centuries rugs and textiles have mirrored the lives of their makers. As an active part of this tradition, Jan Kath’s artworks reference the role of rugs as social commentary. Kath has always consciously broken with traditional ways of seeing, his rug designs taking the viewer beyond any familiar perspective. For the last forty years, Afghan war rugs have depicted the country’s ongoing conflicts and created a woven language of war. Rug Bombs looks to this genre and narrates the global story of war as it needs to be understood today, and questions the origins of violence.

Kath’s experience of war was through his grandparents who were refugees and had to flee the former eastern part of Germany in 1945, when the Russians arrived. However, it is the wars in Iraq and Syria, news of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the ongoing refugee crisis across the globe, that have kept the topic at the forefront of his mind.

Jan Kath is a storyteller; the rugs are his canvas and wool his paint. Exquisitely hand-knotted in wool and silk, Rug Bombs rugs depict harrowing scenes of war, from tanks and fighter jets to displaced people. Referencing pop art, Kath dissects familiar images, and in doing so creates new levels of viewing that are occasionally ambivalent. Patterns from old Bijar, Tabriz or Serapi rugs create shapes on many of the compositions and remind us what medium this is. The rugs’ texture allows the viewer a ‘see and feel’ experience.

Ice People is one artwork from a triptych that focuses on ‘the refugee story’. The image is taken from a famous 1945 photo of people fleeing East Prussia across the Baltic Sea. The imagery on the other two rugs reflects the refugee situation today, which remains similar despite the progress of time. Another artwork is a photorealistic interpretation of an image from photographer Kyle Cassidy’s book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, depicting a family showcasing their weapons along with their kids and pets. The subject of violence is an important one for Kath throughout the collection.

Over the last 25 years Kath has developed a signature rug language that revolutionised the contemporary rug design industry. The rugs are hand-knotted in Kath’s rug ateliers in Nepal and India and take several months to weave. The slow development of the imagery is part of the story to be told.