A prayer mat already does more than simply cover the floor. It marks out a space, gives it a direction and, for a few minutes, changes how the body moves within it. That makes it an unusually loaded object to work with — and one that artists have pushed in very different directions. Alia Farid turns it into a record of movement between countries; Latifa Echakhch removes the very space meant to hold the body; Nour Jaouda takes its proportions and logic far beyond the scale of a mat.

At first glance, the rugs in Alia Farid’s Mezquitas de Puerto Rico look almost traditional. Then you notice the buildings. Instead of an imagined mosque or familiar Islamic architectural motif, they show real mosques in Puerto Rico. The project began when Farid and Puerto Rican artist Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón documented mosques across the island, with those images later translated into woven prayer rugs.

That journey is really the point. A mosque built in the Caribbean is already evidence of people, religion and culture moving across borders. Farid then takes that architecture and sends it through another visual tradition entirely, turning it into a rug. For an artist who works between Kuwait and Puerto Rico, that movement between places appears again and again in her practice. Here, the prayer mat becomes almost like a map — not of one place, but of everything that travelled before it got there.

Latifa Echakhch takes a much more radical approach: she removes the middle. For her Frames series, Echakhch takes prayer rugs and painstakingly pulls out the central section, leaving only the borders and fringes behind. What remains looks almost like the ghost of a carpet. You know exactly what you are looking at, but the part that would normally hold the body has disappeared.

That emptiness is what makes the work so striking. Prayer rugs are usually defined by the space they create for someone; Echakhch keeps the outline but removes everything inside it. She has connected the work to migration and the idea that when we move somewhere new, we take certain frames of reference with us, even if what eventually fills those frames changes. You do not really need that explanation to feel the work, though. The missing centre does most of the talking.

Nour Jaouda takes the opposite approach. Instead of making the prayer mat impossible to use, she makes its logic enormous. Created for the 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Before the Last Sky is made from huge hand-dyed textiles draped over steel structures, with three forms corresponding to different positions in Islamic prayer: bowing, prostration and sitting.

At around nine metres high, this is obviously no longer a mat in any normal sense, but the starting point is still there. A prayer mat has an unusual ability to temporarily change the meaning of a place: put one down and an ordinary patch of floor becomes a space for prayer. Jaouda expands that idea until you are no longer simply looking at the mat — you are standing inside the space it creates. The textiles fold, hang and spill onto the ground, while the steel structures reference architectural details found in mosques, leaving the work somewhere between textile, sculpture and architecture.