Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 Preview: Fragile Parts

Venice – The Victoria and Albert Museum’s first exhibition in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia will examine the impact of new technologies on the cultural value of copying.

A special project of the Applied Arts Pavilion hosted at the Arsenale's Sale d’Armi, A World of Fragile Parts will explore the threats facing global heritage sites from factors such as ecological disaster, violent attack and global tourism. As artefacts at these locations face increasing uncertainty, copies of culturally significant objects have taken on renewed preservation value, while also helping institutions to feed the growing public demand to experience these objects at first hand.

The exhibition will also investigate our changing relationship with copying and the concept of authenticity in an age of increasingly sophisticated scanning and fabrication technologies. What distinguishes a bad copy from one with lasting value? What do we copy and how? These questions will be addressed through a series of commissions from leading architects and designers such as Sam Jacob Studio, Nora Al-Badri, Forensic Architecture and Smout Allen.