Meet the artist revitalising Abu Dhabi’s historic Carpet Souk

Right in the heart of Abu Dhabi’s bustling Carpet Souk, nestled between tightly packed shops brimming with intricate weaves and rich textiles, lies an unexpected sight: a sprawling 66×42-meter astroturf carpet. And this isn’t just any old carpet. It’s a living, breathing tapestry of history and culture laid out on the site of where generations of South Asian expatriates have built their homes and a thriving industry.

Inspired by traditional Afghan war carpets, this tremendous installation, Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home, isn’t just an aesthetic nod to the craftsmanship of the Souk’s vendors. It’s a tribute to their very existence. Every pixelated valley, carefully woven into the carpet’s 8-bit-style design, tells a story. One shows Wali, an Afghan shop owner, lost in memories of his family’s apple orchard. Another depicts Abdul, a shepherd from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, navigating the delicate trade of buying and selling sheep. Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home captures the sacrifices and struggles of the expats from all over South Asia who have spent decades weaving their personal, collective and national histories into Abu Dhabi’s Al Mina Street, etching their legacies onto this land.

The detail and care that went into designing this striking, ornate installation is astonishing. What’s even more astonishing, though, is that just a few months ago, it did not exist at all. The space was nothing more than an unassuming, empty patch of land in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s Carpet Souk, something that self-described “media-agnostic” artist Christopher Joshua Benton was determined to change. So, when Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism approached Christopher to create a project for the city’s first-ever public art biennial, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

“I thought: ‘Well, this is a lot of space. I don’t know who owns it. I don’t know why there isn’t anything here, but this is a great place to put something,'” Christopher tells Dazed MENA from his cosy apartment in Tokyo, Japan, where he’s currently on a residency program. He says he is jet-lagged, but you wouldn’t be able to tell, such is the enthusiasm with which he discusses his craft. “I had this dream that I could get a project like this, but I knew they were really difficult, really expensive, and took a lot of time,” he says. “So when I was approached by the biennial, I knew this was my chance.”

A project of this scale was always going to be ambitious, but for the 36-year-old American artist, it felt like something of an inevitability. By the time the biennial came calling, Christopher had already spent over a decade in the UAE, embedding himself within the communities that built and shaped the country.

In fact, the first time Christopher visited the UAE was spontaneous, spurned by an invitation from his mother, who worked as a teacher in Abu Dhabi at the time. He initially planned to stay for no longer than a few weeks, but that changed the moment he landed. “I fell in love with the people, the lifestyle, and the generosity of the place,” he recalls. What was meant to be a brief trip turned into an entirely new life, one that has defined Christopher’s work as an artist, storyteller and filmmaker since.

He initially worked in advertising, but spending time in Abu Dhabi saw Christopher’s focus shift towards community-centred projects. He became interested in the stories that existed outside the city’s dominant narratives – the ones often overlooked in its sleek, modern image. That curiosity led him to the Carpet Souk on Al Mina Street, a space steeped in history but underrepresented within the Emirates’ cultural discourse. His goal was simple: to create something that truly reflected the people who have long inhabited this land, putting their stories and experiences at its forefront.

“I had lived in Abu Dhabi for a long time, so I wanted to think of a place that other artists being approached for the biennial wouldn’t really consider – somewhere that wasn’t part of the national narrative,” Christopher explains. “They [Department of Culture and Tourism] took all the artists on tours of these really lovely, beautiful places in the city. And I was like: ‘Well, I have to think of a place that only I know, that I love, that I have a connection to’.”

For Christopher, Abu Dhabi’s Carpet Souk is more than just a marketplace – it’s a place of personal, artistic and historic significance. Not only is the market a mere stone’s throw from Studio Benton, Christopher’s studio in Abu Dhabi, but it has also held a vital place for the UAE’s working-class diaspora for decades. Established under the directive of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan only months after the UAE was founded, the Carpet Souk became a space for migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India to showcase their craft, sustain their trade, and build a livelihood. So, it was important for Christopher to actively engage with the people who had made the Souk their home for generations to make Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home.

“Before I even pitched to the biennial team, I talked to a lot of people in the market and I asked them: ‘If we could put something here, what would you want it to look like?’ And the answers they gave me kind of generated what it became,” he explains. “We innately knew that there was a lot of responsibility to accurately represent the things that we heard. And we really pushed to try to understand the people in the market and accurately reflect what we were told.”

Ensuring the carpet sellers were part of the artistic process wasn’t just symbolic – it was fundamental. Christopher invited them to contribute directly, giving them prompts for drawings that were then incorporated into the astroturf installation. “The motifs that we saw the most of – they have to be somewhere on the carpet. That was one of the rules that we created.”

Centring the stories, traditions, and collective histories of the working-class diaspora communities is part of Christopher’s larger artistic ethos – one rooted in compassion. “I think if we knew more about the other, then there would be more empathy; and if there’s more empathy, there would be more sharing, more generosity, more mutual support,” he tells Dazed MENA.

In fact, Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home isn’t the first time Christopher has used his art to spotlight the Gulf’s working-class immigrant communities. His work has long been rooted in the lives, cultures, and collective identities of the region’s diaspora – while also confronting the neo-colonial, capitalist structures that shape the migrant experience in the GCC. This interest is deeply personal, shaped by Christopher’s own experiences growing up Black in the United States.

“I think being a Black person in America, we have this severed connection to our generational legacies,” he says. “And I’m really curious about how other immigrants deal with this severance from their homeland – how there are certain things we’re able to preserve, and how the things we hold on to become a type of resistance to the oppression we face when we’re foreigners in a new land.

“So, I would say part of my interest is personal – thinking about these intersectional commonalities across diasporas.”

Spending time in Satwa, Dubai – a dense, working-class migrant neighbourhood tucked away from the city’s skyscrapers – only intensified Christopher’s curiosities. “I wanted to know what my neighbours’ lives were like,” he recalls. “So, I just gave them a video camera and asked them to film their lives.” The result was Say No to Bachelors Thronging Residential Neighbourhoods, an experimental documentary named after a campaign hostile towards working-class people trying to survive in a city of ever-rising costs.

This film captured the intimacy of everyday life in Satwa, shedding light on the vibrant cultures and tight-knit communities that exist in Dubai beyond the shadows of Downtown’s high-rise buildings. It also highlighted the grim realities many economic migrants endure – exploitative wages and overcrowded housing.

Even though it is illegal, many landlords rent out “bed spaces” – cramped, shared rooms that pack multiple workers into a single apartment. Living in an expensive city with meagre wages, many migrants have little choice but to endure these dire conditions, saving every little bit they can to send their families back home. And, often, even these scant salaries become difficult to secure. It is not uncommon for payments to be delayed for months on end, and, sometimes, never paid at all – a reality Christopher himself became all too familiar with.

“I had a job that didn’t pay me for six months,” he tells Dazed MENA. “And so, the sort of precariousness that people talk about when they discuss the struggles immigrants might face – I’ve actually experienced that, but as an empowered American. So I think, being subject to this precarity, I was wondering how other people dealt with it.”

Featured in Say No To Bachelors Thronging Residential Neighbourhoods is Chirag Shaileshkumar Budheliya, a master tailor who Christopher Joshua Benton befriended while designing Burning Man outfits. “I’ve known Chirag for a really long time, and the first time we ever met was when I commissioned him to make these absurd Burning Man costumes for me – really queer, strange costumes – and he didn’t bat an eye,” Christopher recalls. “I could give him these mood boards, and he could just produce the most incredible things.”

During this time, Christopher suggested visiting Chirag’s home. “You can come to my place,” Chirag replied. “But you’ll be really shocked at how it’s like.”

Christopher, who had already seen his fair share of cramped bed spaces, was still taken aback by the conditions Chirag – an exceptionally skilled and respected creative – was living in. “We went to his place, and there were like 18 beds in his room. We were so shocked. The bunk beds were triple stacked. And to just kind of see him live in a bottom bunk in this space was very emotional for me.”

“If we knew more about the other, then there would be more empathy; and if there’s more empathy, there would be more sharing, more generosity, more mutual support”

This experience led Christopher to grapple with a critical question: how to document this reality without making it feel exploitative or fetishistic. “I was really wondering, was there a way to talk about this moment that we both felt, but also this reality of how so many people in our community live, in a way that presents it plainly without aestheticising it?”

This reflection resulted in Chirag’s Things, a project that poignantly highlights the overcrowding and dire living conditions that many migrant workers endure in the Gulf. “I did not want to be a saviour or extractionist, but to show something that many people may not have known about,” Christopher explains. For him, it’s always about empathy and understanding.

These experiences shaped Christopher’s approach to his installation at the Abu Dhabi Biennial – not just the community-centred focus of the work, but also the way it would be executed and who would benefit from it. Christopher says he is committed to making sure that Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home – the installation itself and its promotion – remains inclusive and representative of the community it highlights and celebrates.

“So, for example, they [the biennial] wanted to put the carpet design on bus tickets to Al Ain. And I was like: ‘Yeah, you can do it, but if you do it, you have to give the bus tickets to the guys in the markets.’ Or, we had food trucks at the site, and I was like: ‘Okay, well, if there are food trucks, then they need to have something that people in the market can afford’.”

At the heart of Christopher’s astroturf installation, there is a deeper concern – one that weighs heavily on him and the generations of workers who have called the Carpet Souk home since Abu Dhabi’s Mina Port was built in 1972. The Souk, a bedrock of the city’s working-class diaspora culture, is at risk of being relocated to a new commercial complex, just a short distance away from where it currently lies.

“It’s like lurking right across the horizon, and you can see it from the Carpet Souk,” Christopher says. “I sometimes had the carpet sellers ask me if or when they were moving.”

For the Souk’s community of artisans, many of whom have lived, worked, and rested in their stores for decades, this move would completely upend their lives. Their closed, intimate ecosystem faces the looming threat of displacement. “The difficulty of when they do move is that there is a question of where will these people live?” Christopher asks.

So, more than anything, Christopher hopes Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home can play a role in preventing this relocation. He has organised a comprehensive program of events at the site of Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home, through to April, until the end of the biennial. “We have poetry nights. We have tabla drum workshops. We have some film screenings during during Ramadan and a langar (free community meal) dinner of Pakistani food. We’re gonna have kite making because there’s a kite scene in the carpet.”

DJ Swanahh, the only Pakistani woman DJ in the country, has also set up an open residency at the Souk. “She allows anyone – but particularly the men in the Souk – to choose whatever they want to play,” Christopher explains, beaming. “It’s really great because there are people who might want music in Pashto or Urdu or different kinds of music from their homelands, and they’re able to listen to it really loud and dance together.”

Ultimately, he hopes these events will pull more visitors into the Souk, amplifying its cultural significance and underscoring the urgency of its uncertain future. To play a role in preserving one of Abu Dhabi’s most vital diasporic landmarks where it has always stood. To, as he puts it, “induce the city to leave the market as it is,” rather than resign it to what feels like its inevitable fate – being moved to yet another one of the countless malls scattered across the UAE’s vast landscape.

Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home is on view until April 30, 2025, at the Abu Dhabi Carpet Souk.