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.
