ABBA NETWORK

Ex-Tate curator Jemima Montagu has spent the last three years working in Afghanistan for the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a charity supported by the Prince of Wales to help preserve the historic centre of Kabul. “I don’t think many curators have had to take out war and terrorism insurance cover,” she reflects on the experience. But it has also given her a far more sympathetic attitude than some to the countries in what George W Bush dubbed “the axis of evil”.

Montagu’s show, East-West Divan, represents 10 artists from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and highlights the cross-fertilisation between Islamic and Western aesthetics that you can see all around Venice, thanks to its past pre-eminence as a port.

It will display giant Iranian pop-art portraits in the neoclassical arches of a 16th-century scuola. “They will be like everyday saints, as opposed to those by Titian and Tintoretto elsewhere in the city,” Montagu says.

There will also be work by the Afghan artist, Khadim Ali. He has done a series of sinister pictures of Rustam, a mythical hero whose image for Ali was tarnished when he heard Taliban fighters, whom he loathes, praising him.