Brown University scholar and curator’s work gets international spotlight at Venice Biennale

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Brown University curator and scholar Gwendolyn Collaço knows firsthand why the Venice Biennale exhibition is known as the Olympics of the art world.

"You really have to challenge yourself to create something that is engaging, thoughtful and original in a set amount of time - and also, you do it under some extreme circumstances because it's not easy to get artwork to Venice and install it," said Collaço, curator for military and society at the Brown University Library.

Collaço, an expert in Islamic art and a member of the special collections staff at the University's John Hay Library, collaborated with acclaimed textile artist Faig Ahmed to curate his site-specific exhibition, "The Attention," for the Azerbaijan pavilion at this year's festival. One of the most prestigious and longest-running cultural events in the world, the Venice Biennale includes a central art exhibition as well as dozens of national pavilions organized by different countries.

In her role at Brown, Collaço oversees the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, which covers military and naval history, particularly from 1500 to 1945. It is the foremost American collection of material devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering and is one of the world's largest collections devoted to the study of military and naval uniforms. Since joining Brown in 2024, Collaço has overseen acquisitions, including ink drawings by contemporary artist Azia Ahmed and a triptych of feminist swords by Aya Shalkar, that expand the breadth of the collection and widen its focus to the visual legacy of warfare, she said.

Collaço joined Ahmed's Venice Biennale project in Fall 2025; she first connected with the artist's works through a previous role at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which holds Ahmed's 2015 work "Essence."

"I happened to have the right combination of experience with historical Islamic textiles and contemporary art exhibitions," Collaço said.

Ahmed, who lives in Azerbaijan's capital city Baku, is known for his surrealist weavings, which integrate visual distortions into traditional Azerbaijani carpets. The installations often appear to melt, warp or pool.

"The Attention," which is on view through Nov. 22 in an exhibition space in the historic Venetian square Campo della Tana, synthesizes traditional art and new technologies. The immersive, seven-room installation explores themes related to perception, quantum theory and mysticism through textiles, as well as sound and video. It features a site-specific carpet that transforms as it spans the exhibition's seven rooms, titled "I Can Contain Both Worlds But I Do Not Fit Into This One."

"What you see when you walk to the pavilion from the outside appears to be a pool of multicolored paint, but it's actually a carpet," said Collaço, who contributed her scholarly expertise to the project with the support of Brown University Library leaders. "It invites you into the space, and it kind of looks like it's sucking you in."

The meditative exhibition, which was designed to be experienced as a continuous narrative, draws on the 15th-century Hurufi mystic tradition, which viewed the universe as a coded text.

"The premise for the pavilion comes from the poet Nasimi, who was writing during a period of chaos and warfare and who creates a mystical paradigm where the entire universe can be interpreted as a structure of letters and numbers, and this is also how physics explains so many fundamentals of the universe," Collaço said. "Artists conceive of textile patterns in a very similar way - all of it is done through a very diagrammatic and encoded language, so that's the parallel being brought forth."

Shaping the Biennale exhibition

She describes the role of a national pavilion curator as "working with the artist to bring the exhibition to its most activated form." That involved overseeing hundreds of decisions, from offering feedback on initial concepts and planning lighting to writing wall text, working through logistics with the city of Venice and festival coordinators, and developing and editing the exhibition catalog.

The role also included thinking with Ahmed about ways to help cue or guide visitors through the experience. For example, the final work in the pavilion, called "Entropy Altar," is a quantum random number generator that translates viewer presence into alphanumerically generated poetry in the

form of seven words for each viewer. Collaço worked with the artist to decide what information to give the viewer on the wall text about how to interact with the piece and what to leave for them to interpret on their own.

Another work features chevron-like patterns that depict the artist's brain waves and heart rate while meditating: "It's choreographed to sound that co responds to the peaks and valleys of the EEG reading, so you're actually experiencing the artist's meditation as you walk around this piece," Collaço said.

Collaço invited Brown University Professor of Physics Stephon Alexander, whose research explores the connections between physics and art, to write an essay for the exhibition catalog. In his piece, Alexander frames Ahmed's exhibition as a scientific enterprise.

"His practice does not merely accompany the scientific process from the outside," Alexander wrote. "It extends it… For this physicist, standing before a carpet that has learned how to dissolve, the feeling is not one of appreciation alone. It is the thrill of recognition: the sense that the answers we seek may already be woven into a language we have not yet learned to read."

Collaço said that working with students and faculty at Brown inspires her to think more deeply about ways that science can illuminate historical craft and artwork.

"I've worked with classes from chemistry to engineering that have analyzed our holdings at the Hay with their expertise," she said. "I am always amazed by how students and faculty generate new perspectives on the material culture we preserve. This project in Venice represents a further extension of that impulse into what was uncharted territory for me: theoretical physics."