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.
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.
