At Abbazia di San Gregorio in Venice, \u001cA Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World\u001d unfolds across a 15th-century Benedictine abbey from May 6\u00193Nov 22, 2026. Commissioned by the Saudi Ministry of Culture as a collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the presentation pares cartography down to its essentials\u00193and expands it into myth, data, and sound\u0019within sight of the Salute vaporetto stop on the Grand Canal.<\/p>\n
Visitors first meet Monira Al Qadiri\u0019s The Children of Smokeless Fire<\/em> (2025), colorful half-human, half-animal cutouts that animate the fa\u0000cade and paline. The work looks back to illustrations for the 13th-century manuscript The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence<\/em> 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 Map\u0019destroyed in Allied bombings\u0019sets the tone: a medieval T\u0019O image of Afro-Eurasia divided by the Mediterranean, the Don, and the Nile underfoot.<\/p>\n Across ingeniously linked caseworks\u0019with sliding magnifying glasses and protection for fragile manuscripts (some facsimiles)\u0019historical materials converse with contemporary art. Illustrated maps and zodiacs echo al-Qazwini\u0019s universe, while a page from Ptolemaei Typus<\/em> (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 Ortelius\u0019s Islandia<\/em> from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum<\/em> (Antwerp, 1595) teems with medieval sea monsters, including a hippocampus and grotesque monster-whales. Nearby, volumes celebrate fictional geographies: \u001cI wisely started with a map\u001d (Daniel Crouch Rare Books) gathers Dante-informed maps of Hell and E. H. Shepard\u0019s map of The Hundred Acre Wood.<\/p>\n The lenders range widely\u0019from 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<\/em> by Matteo Ricci and his Chinese collaborators (one copy held in the Vatican Library), the scope on view remains expansive.<\/p>\n Contemporary works reframe mapping as mindscape and movement. Qiu Zhijie\u0019s Battle of Cochin<\/em> (2023, ink on paper, 70 \u0000d7 70 \u0000d7 3 cm) pairs geological terms with living creatures, while the globe Tellurian 5: Geography of Interests<\/em> (2018) charts ideologies such as occultism, magic realism, sardonicism, and materialism. Reena Saini Kallat\u0019s Woven Chronicle<\/em> (2011\u0019 ), made with circuit boards, speakers, electric wires and fittings, and single-channel audio (366 \u0000d7 1280 \u0000d7 61 cm), traces migration routes in lines that recall barbed wire. On another floor, Peacock Maps\u0019s The Whole Internet<\/em> (1999) appears with a 1986 London Underground map based on Henry C. Beck\u0019s 1933 design, visualizing the networked pre-Y2K internet as it expanded beyond academia and the corporate world.<\/p>\n In the courtyard, writer Tod Wodicka and sound artist Abdullah Miniawy present the site-specific soundscape Sonic Psychogeography<\/em> (2026), alongside Nasser Al Salem\u0019s Each Time a Star Goes Astray<\/em> (2026), whose circles mark the space with colored Murano glass inlaid at strategic points. The exhibition\u0019s final gesture comes via Yoko Ono\u0019s Map Pieces<\/em>: the 1962 instructions, \u001cGive your friends maps,\u001d and, from 1964, \u001cDraw a map to get lost.\u001d<\/p>\n