John Akomfrah’s rug design for Sanctuary, titled The Cave, is a kaleidoscopic pattern based on prehistoric paintings from Argentina’s Cueva de las Manos. “Inside these interlocking caves are some of our first signatures of an idea,” Akomfrah explains. “They are the ghost traces, the carbon footprints of us reaching for and attaining something very powerful, something very long lasting and very human. They are some of the first manifestations of a now near-universal human sense: the idea of an enclosure—marked by a sign of our presence—as a space of benediction, of sanctuary. What the caves tell us, too, is . . . our yearning for sanctuary, both as symbolic evocation as well as real knowledge of an actual place, [is] one of the oldest human yearnings. It’s as old as our sense of home, as enduring as our grasp of time, as defining as our sense of mortality.”
