Sharjah Biennial 15 - First Impressions

Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present opened on February 7 and ends on June 11. Originally scheduled for 2021, this 15th edition, and the 30th anniversary of the biennial includes the largest line up of artists, artworks and locations.

Conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Sharjah Art Foundation’s Director, Hoor Al Qasimi, it includes 300 works by more than 150 artists and collectives in 19 locations spread across 5 cities and towns across Sharjah. A list of all the locations and how to get there is added at the end of this post.

It’s a lot of work to see, and all free to attend, but luckily for people living in the UAE, we have until June. I admit feeling overwhelmed when I read the opening week programme (June 7-12) and decided instantly that I will visit on my own time and pace and not be part of the opening week crowd which includes invited guests, artists, media from abroad and locally, transported by buses to the different locations.

I managed to avoid the opening week crowd and visited 7 locations so far, in the centre of Sharjah and all within walking distance (Galleries 1-6 in Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah Art Museum, Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, Bait Al Serkal, Bank Street Building, Al Hisn, Calligraphy Square) and I’m looking forward to longer road trips to visit the rest of the locations in the coming months.

There’s a lot to unpack, and I’ve yet to read any writings or reviews of the biennial. The following are my first impressions and thoughts that have stayed with me since I visited the locations mentioned above. None of the following is to deny the achievement of Sharjah Biennial - anything related to culture that goes on for a decade or longer in the UAE is a small achievement in itself, but an opportunity for me to think out loud about the biennial and its themes.

SB15 enables nuanced conversations around postcolonial subjectivity, the body as a repository of memories, processes of creolisation and hybridisation, the restitution of museumised objects, the racialising gaze, transgenerational continuities, global modernisms, indigeneity and decolonisation. via Sharjah Biennial 15


Out of the 100s of works I saw so far, seven stayed with me. I was struck by the scale of the biennial, an abundance that makes it difficult to really see and absorb everything in a week for the guests and visitors attending the opening week program. I wondered is it ok to not see everything. Does it justify investing in such a large scale biennial and flying so many people in? And who exactly will have these “nuanced conversations”, besides the ‘art crowd’. A question that comes to mind at most big art events anyway.

Even though the biennial is free to attend and mostly located in areas within residential buildings, shops and public spaces - how many of the people living and working in these spaces (for most Arabic and English isn’t their first language) will engage with the works or even have time to look.

The act of looking (or not looking) is also something to think about, especially when it’s so normalised for people to photograph the works to post on social media instead of actually spending time looking and thinking about the work.

I was amused when I saw this image a few days ago on Sharjah Art Foundation’s Instagram Stories. Hats off to whoever captured this moment. It sums up a lot.

Many buildings and shops along the Sharjah Corniche that’s close/within to the biennial have been demolished, not because of the biennial but for longer term development plans - to recreate the city centre following the blue print from the 1950s (I wrote about this briefly in 2014, you can read it here.). Whilst one is seeing art that is interrogating the past, what we have on the ground in Sharjah is an erasure of the present to recreate the past.

 

Here are my favourite works so far, some are part of a bigger series, so there’s a lot more to see. I included extracts from the catalogue. This year, the description does not include the age or nationality of the artists. None of my photos do the work any justice, and I encourage you to go see these works and a lot more in person.

Al Mureijah Square - Gallery 5

John Akomfrah
My jaw dropped when I walked into the area where this work is, because of its scale. It’s 40+min long and I was thankful there were comfortable seats to sit on. This was one the last works I saw on my first visit and it made so many of the works I saw that day look inconsequential.. My first thought after watching this piece was “THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT”.

John Akomfrah presents Arcadia (2023), a new film project that tackles the ecological implications of settler colonialism, extractive capitalism and the extinction of microorganisms.

By using original filmed scenes in Sharjah and Scotland as well as archival footage, the artist digs into the oral as well as representational history of various Indigenous cultures to create a multi-screen installation that combines events, memories, landscapes, and characters in the form of a ‘mixed media bricolage’.

 

Al Mureija Square - Gallery 3

Anju Dodiya
This artist was a favourite discovery, I felt excited seeing something that looked new to me.

Anju Dodiya presents Bridge of Hesitation (2021–2022), a suite of ‘mattress paintings’ overlaid with or interrupted by watercolour and charcoal drawings and prints. Evoking a melancholic restlessness, the artist’s mournful tableaus make reference to the Greek mythological figure of Daphne, a nymph transformed into a tree by her father, Peneus, to evade the romantic pursuits of the god of hunting, Apollo.

Against an omnipresent backdrop of arboreal imagery, serving as an ode to humanity’s faith in nature, the protagonist of the series, a nocturnal artist resembling Dodiya herself, attends to her work.

Constructing an alternating dialogue between heroism and hesitation as the formal and narrative structure of her work, Dodiya points to the ambivalences of our present moment, suggesting both an uneasiness about the state of the contemporary world as well as a baseline faith in the congenial nature of humanity.

 

Sharjah Art Museum

Pablo Bartholomew and Richard Bartholomew

I was moved by the father-son pairing of this work and want to revisit this series.

On display at Sharjah Biennial 15 is Affinities (1958–1980), a selection of photographs by father and son. Though made over 25 years apart, the images delineate a curiously synchronous relationship between the pair’s individual journeys— one a refugee, the other the child of two refugees, both preoccupied with questions of identity and fascinated by life on the margins. This movement between images taken in very different times sometimes fuses, into a single aesthetic expression.

 

Sharjah Art Museum

Mame-Diarra Niang

Printed on metallic paper, Sama Guent Guii (2021)…composed of ‘nonportraits’ framing blurred subjects that retreat from the point of focus. In this case, however, Niang applies parallel formal and conceptual motifs to her own relationship with Blackness, refusing to render it with granular definition and thereby maintaining its complexity.

 

Sharjah Art Museum

Solmaz Daryani

Solmaz Daryani presents her longterm photographic project, The Eyes of Earth (The Death of Lake Urmia) (2014–ongoing), documenting the continuous environmental degradation of Lake Urmia, where she has cherished memories of growing up. Situated between the provinces of East and West Azerbaijan in Iran, Lake Urmia was once the largest salt lake in West Asia.

It was also a thriving tourist destination, where her grandfather ran a lakefront hotel in the port city of Sharafkhaneh. The artist’s series documents the gradual disappearance of the lake, in addition to the area’s tourism and agriculture industries, over a 20-year span in which 80 percent of its waters have dried up. Her grandfather’s hotel and gardens also now lie in ruins.

The lake’s current state is a result of climate change, excessive development in the agriculture sector and poor water consumption management. Daryani’s otherworldly images of it present a vision of a sacrificial landscape that was abandoned and yet is still inhabited and enjoyed by those who remain at its shrinking shores. They also illustrate the impact of the dying lake on her own family.

 

Bait Al Serkal

Saodat Ismailova

Her Right (2020) takes its aesthetic cues from Uzbek films produced between the 1920s and 1980s. Foregrounding a pivotal moment in the nation’s history—the Soviet unveiling campaign of 1928—the film pays tribute to the countermovement’s countless sacrifices in the name of true autonomy and self-determination.

 

Calligraphy Square - Dar Al Nadwa

Isaac Julien

Isaac Julien’s Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022), a mesmerising five-channel black-and-white video installation exploring the legacies of the philosopher, critic and queer cultural leader Alain Locke and African art collector Albert Barnes, whose collection inspired both Locke and the Harlem Renaissance artists.

Julien reimagines Locke’s relationship and correspondence with Barnes, in which they traded points of view on the shifting categorisation, dismissal and acceptance of Black artists and artworks within art history. Intercut with archival footage of looted African artworks held by the British Museum and augmented with quotes from poets Aimé Césaire and Langston Hughes, the film offers a history that contextualises contemporary efforts for reparations, gesturing at critical dialogues from which new cultural movements can arise.

 
ArtHind MezainaSharjah Biennial 15Comment