2 May 2026
In Venice, where histories of trade, empire, and exchange are etched into every canal and façade, a new exhibition invites us to reconsider how the world has been imagined—and misimagined—across centuries. Opening in tandem with the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World, presented by the Saudi Ministry of Culture, inhabits the storied Abbazia di San Gregorio from 6 May to 22 November 2026.
Wael Shawky, The Gulf Project Camp: Carved wood (after ‘Hajj (Panoramic Overview of Mecca)’ by Andreas Magnus Hunglinger, 1803), 2019. Oil on carved wood 250 x 400 x 15 cm. © Wael Shawky; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
Curated by Sara Almutlaq and Aurora Fonda, with associate curators Zaira Carrer and Amina Diab, the exhibition unfolds as both a meditation and a provocation. It traces cartography not as a neutral science, but as a deeply imaginative—and often ideological—act. Across a sweeping temporal arc, from thirteenth-century maps to newly commissioned works, A Necessary Fiction reveals how the act of mapping has always been entangled with myth, desire, and power.
At its core, the exhibition stages a dialogue between historical artefacts and contemporary artistic practices. Early-modern European maps that once rendered the Arabian Peninsula as Arabia deserta are set against objects that tell a more complex story: incense burners from the first century CE and intricately decorated eighteenth-century manuscripts speak to long-standing networks of trade and cultural exchange. These juxtapositions destabilise inherited narratives, offering a layered, polyphonic view of the region’s past and present instead.
The exhibition’s scenography—developed in close collaboration with designers Ibrahim Kombarji and Bianca Pedron—activates the abbey as both site and subject. Visitors move through a sequence of spatial encounters that echo the maps’ shifting nature. In the courtyard, Nasser Al Salem’s installation gestures toward the cosmological dimensions of cartography, while Matilde Sambo’s interventions trace pathways through the colonnades, guiding bodies as much as eyes. On the façade, Monira Al Qadiri reimagines the journeys of Arab travellers to Northern Europe a millennium ago, collapsing temporal distance into a single, resonant gesture.
Sirāj al-Dīn, ibn al-Wardī Kharīdat al-ʿAjāʾib wa-Farīdat al-Ġarāʾib, (The Pearl of Wonders and the Unique Marvels) 984 AH / 1576–1577, with later additions, including the world map Manuscript on paper 21.8 × 16.1 cm (closed). Photo and collection: Leiden University Libraries, ms. Or. 158, fol. 3b–4a
Elsewhere, artists probe the fragility and instability of mapped knowledge. Shilpa Gupta and Reena Saini Kallat interrogate borders as porous and contingent, while Manal AlDowayan extends the emotional and geographic terrain of belonging through references to AlUla’s landscapes. Nolan Oswald Dennis and Ibrahim Mahama bring a critical Global South perspective to systems of measurement and extraction, reframing cartography as a tool of both control and resistance.
A further thread runs through the exhibition’s engagement with digital cartographies. Works by Trevor Paglen and Eva & Franco Mattes confront a contemporary condition in which navigation is increasingly mediated by invisible infrastructures—satellites, algorithms, and data flows—detaching us from the tactile realities of place. In contrast, Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s walking-based practice insists on the body as a measuring instrument, a means of re-encountering geography through movement and duration. Yoko Ono, characteristically, offers a more speculative proposition: an invitation to imagine one’s own map, shaped by memory, longing, and possibility.
Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle, 2019 – ongoing. Circuit boards, speakers, electrical wiring and fittings, single-channel audio (10 min.). Installation view: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Photography: Mim Sterling. Courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Fiction, as the exhibition’s title suggests, is not an embellishment but a foundational principle. This is perhaps most vividly articulated in Tod Wodicka’s novella, translated into a sound installation by Abdullah Miniawy in the abbey’s courtyard—an aural cartography that expands the exhibition beyond the visual. Here, narrative becomes another form of mapping, charting interior landscapes that resist fixed coordinates.
As Almutlaq and Fonda note, the exhibition “unravels the fictions, allegories, and collective myths that have produced the cartographic,” making visible the ideologies embedded within representations of space. What emerges is not a singular map, but a constellation of perspectives—each one incomplete, contingent, and necessary.
Bringing together works by artists including Monira Al Qadiri, Ahmed Mater, Simone Fattal, Ibrahim Mahama, Shilpa Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat, Trevor Paglen, Yoko Ono, and Qiu Zhijie, among many others, A Necessary Fiction resists closure. Instead, it opens a field of inquiry: how have we come to understand the world as we do, and what might it mean to imagine it otherwise?
In Venice—a city long shaped by its own cartographic ambitions—the exhibition resonates with particular urgency. Here, mapping is revealed not as a fixed record of what is, but as an evolving, contested act of world-making.
