Ahmed Mater
‘100 Found Objects’
The Saudi-backed exhibition “A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World” is currently being staged alongside the 61st Venice Biennale in the Italian city’s 13th-century Abbazia di San Gregorio. There are 78 works in the exhibition, with 29 contemporary artists contributing, nine of whom are from Saudi Arabia, including Mater, one of the Kingdom’s most influential contemporary artists, who contributes this 2015 work that, like many of his other pieces, is inspired by Makkah. It features objects found by the artist within the vicinity of the Kaaba over the course of several years. “Each artefact connects to memories, ideas, symbols, and histories, and those embedded meanings that interest the artist,” material from the exhibition states. “(This) diagrammatic pink map … organizes these objects into a spatial and conceptual system. Unlike conventional topographic representations, this map functions as an archival structure, positioning objects as nodes within a network of historical, spiritual, and affective relations.
In “A Necessary Fiction,” Mater’s map is presented alongside ancient cartographies that placed “sacred cities like Makkah and Jerusalem” at their center. But “100 Found Objects,” the material suggests, “extends cartographic practice beyond the physical realm” and “perfectly illustrates how cartographic structures can be utilized to negotiate memory, meaning, and beliefs.”
