Just over a thousand years ago, the scholar Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Iṣṭakhrī wrote an important book, all about the world he knew. Today the book is known by two titles, Kitāb al-Masālik wa al-Mamālik (The Book of Routes and Realms) and Kitāb Ṣuwar al-Aqālīm (The Book of the Forms of World Regions).

This exhibition centres upon a thirteenth-century manuscript copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s book from the Chester Beatty’s Arabic Collection and a commissioned response by contemporary artist Diaa Lagan.

Meticulously-labelled, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s full-page maps apply pre-modern techniques of exaggerated scale and schematic distortion to deliver both geographical data and an undeniably visual spectacle. These beautiful maps present a poignant visualisation of the world we know today.

Diaa Lagan is an artist based in Dublin. Typically layered in multiple viewpoints and references, Lagan’s powerful work deals with multiple perspectives on the conscious human sense of place, both local and global, and on our enduring relational connectivity to one another.

Lagan’s geo-spatial awareness is also central to al-Iṣṭakhrī’s book and its regional map survey. Glimpses of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s stark maps shimmer under the many layers of Lagan’s paintings, interwoven with modern themes and post-colonial perspectives.

For Lagan, these loaded landscapes offer interregional routeways, defined less by controlled frontiers than by the natural historic flow of human travel through a borderless world.