At Abbazia di San Gregorio in Venice, A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World unfolds across a 15th-century Benedictine abbey from May 63Nov 22, 2026. Commissioned by the Saudi Ministry of Culture as a collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the presentation pares cartography down to its essentials3and expands it into myth, data, and soundwithin sight of the Salute vaporetto stop on the Grand Canal.
Visitors first meet Monira Al Qadiris The Children of Smokeless Fire (2025), colorful half-human, half-animal cutouts that animate the fa cade and paline. The work looks back to illustrations for the 13th-century manuscript The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence by Persian cosmographer Zakariya al-Qazwini, where Djinns inhabit a parallel universe. Inside, a carpet woven with the digital reconstruction of the 13th-century Ebstorf Mapdestroyed in Allied bombingssets the tone: a medieval TO image of Afro-Eurasia divided by the Mediterranean, the Don, and the Nile underfoot.
Across ingeniously linked caseworkswith sliding magnifying glasses and protection for fragile manuscripts (some facsimiles)historical materials converse with contemporary art. Illustrated maps and zodiacs echo al-Qazwinis universe, while a page from Ptolemaei Typus (1561), published in Venice and based on 2nd-century Ptolemy, renders a landlocked Indian Ocean, even as Copernicus had published his heliocentric model in 1543. Abraham Orteliuss Islandia from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1595) teems with medieval sea monsters, including a hippocampus and grotesque monster-whales. Nearby, volumes celebrate fictional geographies: I wisely started with a map (Daniel Crouch Rare Books) gathers Dante-informed maps of Hell and E. H. Shepards map of The Hundred Acre Wood.
The lenders range widelyfrom the Saudi National Museum and the King Abdulaziz Public Library and archive to Yale University, the Bodleian of Oxford, and Leiden University. While the exhibition does not include the 14th-century Catalan Atlas, the Mao Kun map, or the 1602 Kunyu Wanguo Quantu by Matteo Ricci and his Chinese collaborators (one copy held in the Vatican Library), the scope on view remains expansive.
Contemporary works reframe mapping as mindscape and movement. Qiu Zhijies Battle of Cochin (2023, ink on paper, 70 d7 70 d7 3 cm) pairs geological terms with living creatures, while the globe Tellurian 5: Geography of Interests (2018) charts ideologies such as occultism, magic realism, sardonicism, and materialism. Reena Saini Kallats Woven Chronicle (2011 ), made with circuit boards, speakers, electric wires and fittings, and single-channel audio (366 d7 1280 d7 61 cm), traces migration routes in lines that recall barbed wire. On another floor, Peacock Mapss The Whole Internet (1999) appears with a 1986 London Underground map based on Henry C. Becks 1933 design, visualizing the networked pre-Y2K internet as it expanded beyond academia and the corporate world.
In the courtyard, writer Tod Wodicka and sound artist Abdullah Miniawy present the site-specific soundscape Sonic Psychogeography (2026), alongside Nasser Al Salems Each Time a Star Goes Astray (2026), whose circles mark the space with colored Murano glass inlaid at strategic points. The exhibitions final gesture comes via Yoko Onos Map Pieces: the 1962 instructions, Give your friends maps, and, from 1964, Draw a map to get lost.
