Sharjah Art Foundation is pleased to announce the title, approach and participant list for the16th edition of Sharjah Biennial. Works by more than 140 participants, including over 80 new commissions, will be presented across the Emirate of Sharjah. 

Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, Sharjah Biennial 16 will convene under the title to carry, a multivocal and open-ended proposition. Examining an ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, the Biennial is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.

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. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?

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.

As carriers of different processes and offerings, the curators have cultivated their projects together and apart, allowing room for listening and mutual support. Diverse curatorial methodologies—from residencies, workshops and collective production to writing, sonic experiences and expanded publications—will be constantly present in the milieu of the Biennial, encouraging critical conversations and the formation of an evolving collection of narratives told from multiple perspectives, geographies and languages.

“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 Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. “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.”

According to the curators, “Our projects come under the umbrella of a question rather than a theme. What does it entail to carry a home, ancestors and political formations with you? This spirit of inquiry coalesces with artistic methods grounded in stories of change and movement, intergenerational kinship, lament and ritual, experimental pedagogies, knowledge of land and sea terrains. Attesting to the responsibility as both guest and host, we conjure possibilities of acting in the world and being together through tenderness, failure and rage as gestures of care, resource exchange and alliance building.”