Alighiero Boetti - Tate Modern

Boetti was an Italian artist who spent 1970’s in Afganistan until forced to leave when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, he opened an hotel in Kabul as an art project. His outstanding works, which take up 2 rooms of this exhibition alone, are a series of embroideries, some very large, of maps of the world with the countries represented by their flag. He did these from the middle of the Cold War till the early 1990’s tracking the changing geopolitical situation. He used helpers with the stitching, women in Afganistan and then Pakistan. One map features a bright pink sea which came about because the stitchers, living in a land-locked country, did not recognise the ocean on the map. Therefore they used the colour which was in plentiful supply, which happened to be pink. Apparently Boetti loved the random nature of this solution and it certainly makes for a striking image.