VENICE: “A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World” is a Saudi-backed exhibition being staged alongside the 61st Venice Biennale.
The show is curated by Sara Almutlaq and Aurora Fonda alongside associate curators Zaira Carrer and Amina Diab and exhibition designers Ibrahim Kombarji and Bianca Pedron. The Saudi Ministry of Culture has a long-term lease on the Italian city’s 13th-century Abbazia di San Gregorio, and “A Necessary Fiction,” which runs until November, is its first long, curated exhibition there. The show explores, according to a press release, “our enduring need to create models of the world.”
Visitors to the installation ‘Each Time a Star Goes Astray’ by Saudi artist Nasser Al-Salem. (Supplied)
That doesn’t just mean maps and globes, Diab tells Arab News.
“We have the pre-cartographic, which looks at everything that came before the map; how people used oral traditions, poetry, and tools to orient themselves in the world, like the astrolabe, for example,” she says.
Participating institutions include the King Abdulaziz Public Library, the Saudi National Museum and the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archive, as well as the Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana of Vicenza and the Cremona State Library.
In the exhibition’s first room, visitors will find the Idrisi map, created in the 12th century by Islamic cartographer Muhammad Al-Idrisi following a commission from the King of Sicily. At the time, Diab tells Arab News, it was considered “the most accurate map of the world.”
“Accuracy” in cartography is a thorny subject, of course, as Diab points out.
“I want to reflect on the title of the exhibition,” she says. “Maps are always thought of as these tools of truth, or accurate tools of documentation and orienting yourself in the world. But actually, they’re full of the imaginary, they’re full of fiction, they’re full of abstraction. All maps are abstractions of reality. You really see how theology, ideology, culture… all were embedded in that. Hence, ‘A Necessary Fiction.’ Maps are full of projections of so many layers of things. And ‘fiction’ is not necessarily a ‘negative’ word in this context. People were trying to orient themselves in the world, but some places were unknown, and these unknown places were completely fictional and full of myth.
“Many of the maps are very arbitrary; they’re full of projections, abstractions. If you look at old Islamic maps, the south was at the top — they’re inverted. Why? Because it really depends on who’s creating the map,” she continues, adding that in medieval Islamic maps, Makkah was always at the center. In their European counterparts, Jerusalem was.
“One of the most surprising things that you find in both Islamic and European traditions is these mythical imaginary creatures inhabiting unknown lands,” she explains. “When territories were still not charted, it was believed that unknown lands were full of jinns or mythical creatures.”
The Abbazia di San Gregorio in Venice, where ‘A Necessary Fiction’ runs until November. (Supplied)
There are 78 works in the exhibition, with 29 contemporary artists contributing. There are also seven new commissions, including “Each Time a Star Goes Astray” by Saudi artist Nasser Al-Salem, created between Riyadh and Venice with Murano glassmakers — “a nice conversation between two places” Diab says — on display in the courtyard.
“We really allowed artists to push the boundaries of production. [Al-Salem] has never worked at this scale, for example,” Diab says. “It is based on a Bedouin poem — Bedouins used the stars to orient themselves in the desert. And he’s taken stone and put verses of the poem onto a spherical installation, then embedded within it is the [local Italian] Murano glass, which (forms) the stars.”
Other Saudi artists participating in the show include Ahmed Mater, Manal AlDowayan, Sarah Abu Abdallah, Abdulmohsen Albinali, Marwah Almugait, Basmah Felemban and Abdullah Miniawy.
Another exhibition highlight Diab cites is Kuwaiti artist Monira Al-Qadiri’s “Children of Smokeless Fire” — a series of seven figures displayed on the façade of the building. “(The work) was inspired by the mythical creatures you find in cosmography,” she says. “If you’re coming from the water, you’re greeted by these creatures. It’s a real showstopper. People on the (local water bus) are always asking what they are.”
Both the building and Venice itself were important factors in the exhibition’s curation, Diab explains.
“Venice is historically a place of travelers, of navigators, a trading port with all the ships passing through, so this idea of maps and finding your way is deeply relevant,” she says. “We came in as curators and said ‘OK, how will we create a dialogue between the historic and the contemporary?’ Maps can be a very nerdy topic, right? So we always had this idea of, ‘How are maps still relevant to us today?’ There are so many contemporary artists interested in cartography and in map-making. The more we researched, and the more we spoke to artists, the more we realized that the map — as a model, as an abstraction — is very much used by artists to try and understand the world today.”
