Sharjah Art Foundation has announced the title, approach and participant list for Sharjah Biennial 16, due to run 6 February to 15 June next year (the opening events are 6-9 February). There will be work from more than 140 participants, including 80 new commissions.
The joint curators – Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz – have given SB16 the title ‘to carry’: This has quite of lot of heavy lifting to cope with: “the Biennial theme, ‘to carry’, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance … Thus, ‘to carry’ proposes the Biennial as a collective wayfinding and a modality of sense-making and insistent looking – back, inwards and across – instead of a ‘turning away’ amidst tides of annihilation and tyranny … Sharjah Biennial 16 curatorial projects reflect on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities as community doulas would hold space for others during moments of transition …”
Arguably any biennial could be about wayfinding and sense-making. So Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, has usefully summarised the expectations: “By centring the act of carrying, Sharjah Biennial 16 offers a space for imagining new collective futures while recognising the weight of shared histories and experiences”.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the five curators have worked together (and individually) to bring the carrying theme into the commissions, exhibitions and projects. They do after all come from very varied backgrounds and bring a variety of approaches to the task; “the constellation of diverse methodologies that the five curators have gathered offers audiences the opportunity to engage in thought-provoking dialogues bridging the local context with global narratives about identity, movement, change and collectivity”, said Sheikha Al Qasimi.
Swastika is director of the Biennale Jogja Foundation and has a specialisation in Indonesian female artists during Indonesia’s New Order. Khalaf is an artist and curator who is director of programmes at Cubitt and civic curator at the Serpentine Galleries, both in London. Tamati-Quennell is a writer and curator with a specialist focus in the field of modern and contemporary Māori art. Ginwala is artistic director of COLOMBOSCOPE. Öz is a curator and writer who was co-founder and director of the Spot Production Fund, Istanbul (2011–2017).
So we’re expecting to see a lot of experimental methodologies, plus overlays of the indigenous view and women’s roles in knowledge creation and delivery. But there will be much more than this; Sharjah Biennials are always interesting, and usually surprising too.
There’s more information on the website, including the full curatorial statement and the list of participants. Sharjah Biennial 16 takes place in locations around the emirate including Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid, Kalba, Al Madam and the SAF base in Sharjah City. It runs 6 February to 15 June 2025, and you can register here for information.
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