Sebastian Mayer: Hannibaby and Zarafa

A public artwork, performance and community project, Sebastian Mayer’s Hannibaby draws from an absurd family adventure. Structuring a life-size baby elephant puppet around his toddler’s carrier, the duo covered a 70km-distance from France into Italy through the Cottian Alps in 2026; Mayer’s trajectory creates a parallel between Hannibal’s storied challenges navigating unchartered landscape and his own encounter with the demands of parenthood. In Sharjah, Hannibaby manifests as a walkabout performance by the life-sized baby elephant puppet, alongside a workshop series instructing families in the art of creating and decorating their own 3D elephant masks. It also includes family-friendly movement games and other playful puppetry activities.

Another performance, Zarafa, retraces the extraordinary journey of the eponymous giraffe – the first to set foot in France in 1827, a diplomatic gift from Muhammed Ali Pasha of Egypt to Charles X of France. In 2023, Mayer created a life-size giraffe puppet and walked Zarafa’s original 1000km route from Marseille to Paris. Along the route, local communities were invited to paint and draw directly onto the giraffe. For Perform Sharjah, Mayer will use the giraffe puppet to conduct walkabouts for audiences and play host to a community canvas at Bait Obaid Al Shamsi.

There are performances at 4.30–6.30pm and again at 6.30–8.30pm. It’s repeated on 15 November.

This is part of the fifth edition of Perform Sharjah, Sharjah Art Foundation’s season of curated performances that serve as an engaging space for exploring, remembering and imagining – “treating the body as a site of artistic inquiry, the programme shifts fluidly between intimate reflection and collective experience”.

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