VCU Arts Qatar stages collateral exhibition during the Venice Biennale exploring the thresholds of perception

The institution’s debut Venice Biennale collateral exhibition seeks to redefine the boundaries between art, technology and human cognition

While the curation of the 61st Venice Biennale by the late Koyo Kouoh sought to shift away from high-tech spectacle and internet-optimized art to focus on art that reflected a slower, more contemplative pace, several collateral exhibitions seek to similarly cater to a more reflective atmosphere, through the incorporation of technology and AI. The exhibition Aghrab Idrāk, which translates from Arabic to mean “strange knowledge” or “unusual perception,” did exactly this. Marking VCU Arts Qatar debut participation at the Venice Biennale, the co-curators of the exhibition –Hesperia Iliadou, Director of the Museums & Exhibitions Study Society, Venice and Chase Westfall, Head of Gallery at VCUarts Qatar [1] —drew the title from historical philosophical exchanges between the ancient Greek and Arab works to challenge how individuals today view academic research and art creation.

“At the heart of Aghrab Idrāk is the belief that creative research does more than reflect culture,” said Amir Berbić, the dean of VCUarts Qatar in his opening address marking the exhibition’s opening in Venice. “It actively participates in shaping how we understand it. The projects presented here explore how we experience the world through our senses, our languages, and our relationships with one another. And together they invite us to think about perception, not as something fixed, but as something fluid, shaped by context, movement, and memory.”

The exhibition, which opened on June 1st at Palazzo Cavanis in Venice and runs until November 22, offers an engaging display of inventive multidisciplinary range of digital and kinetic artworks produced by faculty and researchers from VCUarts Qatar. Instead of presenting a single narrative, the artworks appeal to the audience through diverse uses of light, sound, movement, shadow and physical materials. The common thread that unites the works is their ability to cater to new forms or ideas of human perception. Key works include A Monocular Monologue mesmerizing albeit unsettling, dystopian, cyclops-like robot by Mesh Lab that behaves like a modern-day disaster. The robotic figure speaks about its own artificial existence, itself contemplating the creation of forces that are operating beyond human control. The works on show, structured in the palazzo, as a series of spatial thresholds, invites visitors to move through environments that foreground the subtle forms of experience, including proximity, sustained sensory attention, ambiguity and repetitive light and sound. Another evocative work is Preceding Emptiness, a large-scale LED light installation by xLab that transforms the physical clicking noise of fluorescent bulbs into an intentional acoustic—the sharp, repetitive movements coupled with the sound are strangely compelling.

 The works presented aim to challenge our perception of reality and ask us to consider what we see in new ways. “The phrase Aghrab Idrāk offers an expansive set of meanings,” said Westfall during the exhibition’s opening. “Threshold speaks to the radical positioning of the research that is on display at the edges and borders and intersections of disciplinary domains. It also speaks to the liberal boundaries in the exusition space, the doorways and passages that connect while also mediating between the different projects as nodes within a network or as islands within an archipelago. There are these individual moments within a continuity.”

The “edges and borders” Westfall references also point to culture crossroads, and the exhibition aptly offers an intersection of cultural worlds from the east and the west. Aghrab Idrāk merges Arab and Khaleeji or Gulf culture by blending traditional elements with cutting-edge technology, including AI, kinetic design and electronic acoustics, to explore topics such as migration and cultural resilience. An example is the cross-cultural digital typeface and textile art project Bandhani Arabi: From Thread to Word created by TypeAraby, an experimental platform and research lab dedicated to the creation, preservation and evolution of Arabic typography and type design initiated by the Graphic Design Department at VCUarts Qatar and founded in 2019 by designer and educator Basma Hamdy. I started teaching graphic design in a Western institution in the Middle East and I found that there weren’t enough references in Arabic type. I also felt that the technological form of Arabic type was not rich enough to reflect the history of the calligraphic history of the region. I also felt that we were inheriting very Western ways of teaching the students very Western traditions. And we needed to look into our histories and kind of untangle some of these traditions to bring them into technology.” When TypeAraby uses a typeface, a digital form of calligraphy, explains Hamdy, the platform looks at how it can incorporate historical crafts and traditions so that the typeface becomes embedded with heritage rather than a merely a superficial decorative element. TypeAraby’s vibrant, multilayered artwork showcases Arabic typography constructed out of intricate, handtied Indian tie-dye or Bandhani dot patterns.

Also focusing on the Arab world is The Gulf Between Us by Water with Water, an experimental publishing project and visual research studio based in Doha, Qatar, created in the form of a physical zine and sculptural installation documenting the quiet, nuanced and often untold stories of daily life in the modern Arab Gulf while seeking distance from orientalist tropes.

The exhibition’s official opening on June 22 was accompanied by the public symposium Relational Ecologies: Perception, Mobility, and Collective Form (23–24 June), gathering artists, designers, curators and researchers to explore creative practice across histories, infrastructures and communities. The symposium, an extension of the exhibition, further examined how contemporary creative practices navigate shifting cultural narratives, technological advancements and translocal migration—meaning how people move from one place to another while maintaining strong emotional and economic ties to their home communities.

“What we were looking at was the generation of knowledge and through creative practice,” explains Dr. Diane Derr, Associate Dean for Research and Development at VCUarts Qatar. “[The symposium] was about building on the question of the generation of knowledge and how we understand the knowing of knowledge, so to speak, and looking at it not through the collective form as was done in the exhibition, but rather through perception that crosses modalities of practice and material explorations. We looked at the formation of knowledge through archives, through information that perhaps isn't readily accessible— through information that is truly generated through the lived human experience.”

Indeed, the strength of this exhibition and the accompanying symposium was its emphasis on the power of human perception and knowledge in the age of the digital. The artworks, as did the symposium, demonstrate how human experience is a complex, felt and relational mode of knowledge—one that doesn’t lessen with technological advancements but perhaps, as might be gleaned from the show, transforms with it.