Fatma Al Ali
Global Positioning System is an exhibition dedicated to mapping and navigation systems. It tells stories of fast cars and donkeys, spinning globes and street barricades, cosmic highways and broken bridges. Gathering over forty artists across Art Jameel’s two centres in Dubai and Jeddah, the exhibition presents a wide range of artistic practices—from research-based engagements with infrastructure projects to conceptual works that question the very perception of distance.
Maps, remaining the dominant representation space, carry a heavy weight. Far from reflecting geography objectively, they are instruments of power that embody specific worldviews. Though based on mapping, navigation systems render traditional maps redundant; they reduce navigation to an abstract exercise and remove the need to comprehend the physical space one moves through. This exhibition’s central provocation is to steer away from the map’s imposing presence, asking what remains of space and movement in its absence.
Focusing on movement, conceptual gestures and time-based practices, ‘Global Positioning System’ approaches navigation with friction, interruption and uncertainty. Navigation situates bodies and calibrates speed across shifting coordinates. When these systems fail, they produce aberrations and standstills ranging from minor inconvenience to profound catastrophe. Yet, failure can also offer protection, providing opaque camouflage against all-seeing technologies and creating generative zones of illegibility and evasion.
Set against contested topographies and simulated landscapes, the exhibition engages with the infrastructure of mobility that enables transport and trade, questioning the promises of speed and progress. It questions home and its coordinates, landscapes in transformation, and what navigation means when the destination is not a place but a recollection. Before routes are built, they are projected; before territories are fixed, they are narrated. ‘Global Positioning System’ engages these imaginaries, suggesting that orientation is as much about traversing as it is composing new worlds.