The Art of Cartography

I can barely follow a map, I certainly can't fold one back up and I can drive round a roundabout and not recognise which exit I joined it from. Luckily this isn't a hindrance to the appreciation of two very different exhibitions on the subject of mapmaking - 'Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art' at the British Library, and 'Whose Map is it? New Mapping by Artists' at Rivington Place, both of which are as much about artistry as they are about geography.

In 'Magnificent Maps' the British Library have drawn from their cartographic collection of almost 4.5 million items (who knew they had such a stash?) to create a showcase of 200 wall maps, atlases, books, prints and globes dating from 200AD to the present day. Aside from the complex historical and political information these works reveal about when, where and for whom they were made, the art and craftsmanship in many of them is incredible and it's the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, before there was any real distinction between 'maps' and 'art' that highlights a golden age.

An intricately detailed aerial woodcut of Venice from 1500 bigs up the Venetian Republic with the inclusion of images of fleets of sailing ships and gods in clouds puffing favourable winds on the city; an eighteenth-century map of the Goehrde hunting forest in Hanover, a favourite of George I, appears to detail every individual tree, shrub and bush, along with scenes of successful hunting expeditions.

To provide context, the show groups the works according to the setting in which they may originally have been shown; the hunting ground displayed alongside paintings and sculpture in palace galleries, as a demonstration of a King's land and power, for example, while Medieval world maps, often containing religious imagery would most likely be found in bedchambers, as areminder of the proximity of God and the eternal. 'The street' is one of the locations for examples of more contemporary maps, such as military propaganda posters, publicity or public information. That these groupings don't always come together doesn't detract from the overall experience because with treasures like these, its the maps themselves that steal the show.

At Rivington place 'Whose Map is it?' features works by nine contemporary artists (coincidentally all female), including new commissions, who use mapping as a starting point to explore political, social and cultural structures. These works, in a range of media including film, painting, sculpture and installation are as much about mapping journeys as boundaries. Dutch artist Esther Polak equips traditional nomadic Nigerian dairy herdsmen with GPS and then recreates the graphic GPS lines of their journeys in front of them, as drawings in the dirt. Their recognition and translation of what each twist and turn in the line represents in the landscape (shown as a combination of film and prints) neatly reveals how the most technologically advanced and the most basic of mapmaking techniques, on a human level, have the same meaning.

Alexandra Handal's more poetic sculptural installation is a map of an action of unforgetting. By repeatedly writing the names of the 400 plus Palestinian villages that ceased to exist after 1948, in snaking lines of text on layers of translucent vellum paper, Handal powerfully evokes the need to keep reinforcing a visible memory of something that has already been lost. Oraib Toukan's interactive magnetic wall map puzzle also takes its starting point in the disputed territories of the Middle East, highlighting how randomly boundaries can be erased and redrawn by inviting visitors to fit the individual pieces of the map together in their own configuration.

Gayle Chong Kwan's tracing of the migration and adaptation of the Rumba dance from Cuba to all over the world maps a more celebratory movement of both individual bodies and of the dance itself but often it's the simplest subjects that have the most emotional impact. Bouchra Khalili's ongoing series of short films show unseen individuals tracing forbidden and dangerous journeys they have made, either as illegal migrants or victims of ongoing disputes in their own homeland, in pen on a map. Their accompanying narration of their often life-threatening experiences, in a combination of languages, illustrates the huge and very human effect of what it can mean to draw a simple line on a map.

'Magnificent Maps: Power Propaganda and Art' is at the British Library until 19 September 2010. 'Whose Map is it?' is at Rivington Place until 24 July 2010.