Sharjah Art Foundation

Sharjah Biennial 16

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
6 Febuary — 15 June 2025

Against Art History

This presentation by Sadia Shirazi, titled ‘Against Art History’, critically evaluates decolonial art exhibitions and curatorial frameworks. It asks to what extent art history can be decolonial, when its disciplinary and architectural foundation, the museum, is an inherently colonial institution. The talk presents research published in an essay of the same title that was commissioned for the March Meeting Papers. Selected through the March Meeting 2021 open call, the essays included in the March Meeting Papers expand on curator Okwui Enwezor’s influential thinking about the Biennial as a platform to engage with history, politics and society. Taken together, these essays reveal the extent to which the biennial model, such as the Sharjah Biennial, has contributed to the realisation of new narratives and experiences of modern and contemporary art.

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MM 2021: Against Art History

Shirazi, Sadia

Sadia Shirazi is a writer, art historian, architect and independent curator whose research focuses on transregional histories of modernism and contemporary art across South Asia, the Middle East and their diasporas.