Sharjah Biennial 16

Peter Friedl employs a range of genres, mediums and forms of display in order to explore the construction of history and different modes of narration.

With an emphasis on text, Noor Abuarafeh works with various mediums, but she considers each to be another form of a novel.

Combining sound, light, costumes and objects from a prison complex, the site-specific installation is derived from an archive of oral histories from the Tunisian prison system.

Drawing from a lifetime of complex entanglements with the physical and emotional legacies of the Vietnam War, Pipo Nguyen-duy’s photography is influenced by traditional landscape painting and theatrical composition.

Byron Kim’s abstract conceptual practice includes a series of paintings that depict the night sky.

Dineo Seshee Bopape’s recent constellation of sculptures reflects on a South African protest song that envisioned the country’s struggle against apartheid as part of a larger pursuit of liberation across the continent.

I have always believed that calligraphy can have a dynamic effect on the way we see and understand the world.

"10 Commandments for the 21st Century" is a 10-point list of simple rules of behaviour.

In 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World, a list of numbered guidelines seem to be narrated by tulips with faces drawn on their petals.

Arabic calligraphy turns a phrase into an artwork by exploiting the expressive potential inherent in its forms.

Calligraphy enjoys the same expressive abilities as poetry, since all the arts are interrelated, each one paving the way for the other.

He began culling images from newspapers and magazines, instinctively juxtaposing them.

Fateh Moudarres is widely considered to be one of Syria and the Arab world’s seminal modernists.

The work of Shadi Habib Allah navigates across networks of people, technologies, objects, images and the economy.

Conceived by Kamin Lertchaiprasert, the 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit is an art project and conceptual museum.

Alfredo Jaar is an architect, photographer and filmmaker whose work in a range of mediums brings attention to issues that are overlooked by the media or suppressed by state and transnational structures of power and exploitation.

Robert MacPherson’s work combines a rigorous conceptual base with observations on ordinary life and people.

Figures intertwine, almost floating, while recurring images of faces recall Zayat’s other endeavour – conservator and restorer of orthodox icons.

Radouan Mriziga’s performance of 7 envisions the moving body as measure, maker and medium of expression.

Imane Djamil’s multidisciplinary practice examines the transformation of space by humans. Engaging viewers in photojournalistic projects imbued with the style of docudramas, her works straddle the realistic and phantasmagoric.

Considered among the most accomplished Arab painters and printmakers, Ziad Dalloul has been captivated with natures mortes, or still life, noting that the English word describes his practice more faithfully than the French one.

Simryn Gill’s projects have often focused on the presentation and transformation of found objects to examine relationships between culture, knowledge and place.

Rodney McMillian’s multimedia work addresses themes of economic inequity and identity in contemporary American society.

In the late nineteenth century, trade cards – long used by merchants to advertise their businesses – became what we today know as ‘trading cards’.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and 'private ear', or independent audio investigator.

Through oral documentation, multidisciplinary collaboration and wordplay, Mounira Al Solh bears witness to the impact of conflict and displacement across the region.

Anawana Haloba often investigates the social, economic, ideological and cultural conditions of post-independence and the rapid shifts in subjectivity brought on by globalisation.

A Dream of Warsaw documents the work leading up to an exhibition by Polish architect, urban planner, theorist and teacher Oskar Hansen.

A Hanging Garden is a site-specific garden project that is informed by the tension at the far edge of growth and the desert.

Tracey Moffatt’s visual style draws attention to the fractures lurking beneath societal facades and the violent, enduring legacy of Australian colonialism.

Shaped by the experience of coming of age during the post-independence Angolan Civil War, Kiluanji Kia Henda reflects on the ruptures of colonial rule and conflict while framing Angolan identity within broader global historical narratives.

Rushdi Anwar draws from his personal experience as a Kurdish refugee and survivor of state violence to contemplate issues of displacement and trauma
endured as a result of colonial and ideological regimes.

Installation in collaboration with Neda Saeedi.

A Love Story is a miniature narrative in four acts where time becomes fluid as the image is distilled to its inner self.

Hyesoo Park’s work takes inspiration from the social landscape of everyday life—overheard conversations, daily routines and common problems—offering insight into the psychological issues we face in a fiercely competitive society.

Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon are prohibited from practicing more than seventy professions, except, fortunately, art.

Tonico Lemos Auad’s work demonstrates here his interest in medicinal plants and herbs, and reflects the inspiration he draws from the natural environment, his surroundings and delicate architectural structures.

A Monument for the Living is a human-scale replica of the notorious Burj al Murr, a derelict concrete high-rise that towers over downtown Beirut.

During a five-decade career beginning in the mid-1960s, Harun Farocki created more than 120 films and installations that analysed the power of the image.

This video is based on materials from the personal archive of Jacques Chevallier, who was mayor of Algiers from 1953 to 1958, a key period in the architectural, social and political history of Algiers.

Decoder can be read as an inverted monument to the preferred mythology of a consumer-driven model of market capitalism.

Mary Sibande engages counter- historical narratives and the language of dress to animate the stories of South African women and critique western imperialist depictions of their lives.

A Small Town at the Turn of the Century is a series of 39 type C photographs that were taken by Simryn Gill in Port Dickson in Malaysia, the town where she grew up.

mixrice has worked with a community of migrant workers in Maseok, an industrial area outside of Seoul, since 2002.

Ibrahim Mahama's large-scale installations surface narratives of capitalism, global trade, crisis and injustice in materials reclaimed from the built environment of his native Ghana.

A Typology of Houses is a descriptive record of culture made manifest in the building vernacular of residential housing in Dubai.

The grounded political art of Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara embodies his personal commitment to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and peace.

Across the Chalk Line (2015) is a public art project in the form of a junior-sized cricket oval designed for neighbourhood children.

Adriana Bustos’ practice draws on ideas taken up in areas of anthropology, history, science, popular culture, fiction, biographical writings, and academic and intuitive knowledge.

Two thirty-five-minute videos assemble sequences borrowed from news reports from the archives of Soviet Television in the last century.

Jawad Al Malhi’s multidisciplinary practice reflects upon the Palestinian social fabric, illuminating cyclical human movements and daily routines in East Jerusalem.

Matt Saunders scuttles boundaries between media to make works that balance between the painted and the photographic.

For SB14, Otobong Nkanga with Emeka Ogboh collaborate on a series of multimedia interventions in the heritage house Bait Al Aboudi and the surrounding grounds.

Carolina Caycedo's multidisciplinary artistic practice draws from Indigenous epistemologies in her research examining the future of shared resources.

The artist writes the word ah in black ink on water.

At the intersection of art and activism, Meleanna Meyer’s practice draws from Hawaiian history, cultural anthropology, Indigenous linguistics, architecture and set design.

Following in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Tomas Saraceno’s installation, sculpture, photography and video work challenge the conventional restrictions on the human habitat, and suggest new ways of perceiving nature.

The following is a text in progress, dating back to 1985 and now published in its eighth state; it is the Ars Pictorica of the Airmail Paintings:

Dressed like grown men, with glued-on moustaches and dubbed with the voices of adults, a group of boys retell a story by Egyptian writer Mohamed Mustagab.

The Neighbour Before the House is a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem.

Personal responsibility is what is most important for the future.

Abdullah Al Saadi presents a series of works produced during his SB12 commission Al Zannoba Journey (2015). This project continues previous journeys the artist has undertaken over several years and records the landscape he encounters and his experience in nature.

With exhibition format and other museological methodologies as his medium, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s multifaceted practice incorporates the activities of a researcher, archivist, historian and curator.

SB13 pays homage to Ali Jabri in a presentation focusing on his lesser-known collage works.

Aline Baiana’s SB14 installation draws parallels between the construction of hydropower plants in Brazil and Lebanon, both of which would endanger rivers and the areas of biodiversity they support.

As an artist, curator, professor and writer, Christopher Cozier explores the Caribbean as a place that has shaped and is shaped by the world.

Sarnath Banerjee is a storyteller who creates freehand sketches and drawings that incorporate text as well as film.

James Webb’s interdisciplinary practice examines the depths of audiovisual culture.

Palestinian-American Tarek Halaby’s performance for the Biennial is an unfinished project, an ongoing product or situation that echoes the unresolved Palestinian situation.

Walid Raad discusses his 15-year project The Atlas Group, and Adila Laidi-Hanieh discusses the issues of culture and Arab modernities.

In her work, Haegue Yang has employed ready-made objects.

Anarcheology (2014) delves into Christoph Keller’s time spent in the Amazon and his thinking about archaeology.

Runa Islam counterpoints two lines of enquiry for Sharjah Biennial 11, utilising the exhibition space as a stage on which to culminate one series of works, and simultaneously to start another.

Tahila Mintz engages with ancestral systems of matriarchy, gender equality and contemporary issues impacting Indigenous societies.

Popularly characterised as examples of Third Cinema, Kidlat Tahimik’s artistic experiments hone an approach to storytelling that does not require a singular time or end

Manthia Diawara’s capacious scholarly and creative practice grapples with the politics of postcolonialism, decolonisation, migration and globalisation.

In the Arab world, where people are major consumers of technology but not involved in any aspect of its production, most individuals equate progress with the acquisition of modern equipment.

Uschi Huber’s work centres around the use of photography and video, creating both her own series of images as well as working with already existing pictorial material.

Antoine Catala examines everyday communication tools and the ways in which humans use and consume media.

Sharjah Biennial 14 presents 13 of Shemza’s works created between 1961 and 1969, surveying his diverse influences during this transitional period and the decisively modern diasporic perspective examined through the prism of both Islamic and Western aesthetics.

An Anmatyerre elder and lifelong custodian of women’s ‘dreaming’ sites in her clan country of Alhalkere, Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910–1996) developed an abstract visual language centred around ancestral spirits and Australian Aboriginal cosmology.

An artist, writer and musician, Ross Simonini is well known for his interviews, dialogues and writings about artists, philosophers, thinkers and actors.

Best known for her performance work that embodies a feminist perspective, Tracey Rose often conceives of rich characters who inhabit tableaus as visceral, complex and unnerving as the worlds from which they are torn.

Claudia Losi’s work, moving between an emotional approach and a more conceptual one, shows her strong interest in historical change and the complexity of natural phenomena, with attention to scientific and literary disciplines.

Arcadia (2011) is an installation comprising eleven large paintings, two of which are on exhibit at Al Hamriyah Studios.

Through his experimentation with the moving image, John Akomfrah delves into themes of memory, identity, postcolonialism, temporality and the politics of aesthetics.

Gabriela Golder examines the intersection between labour and memory from a wide variety of sources— political, mythical and medical—to highlight the aftereffect of violent state actions.

While many Western critics have emphasised the national, religious and ethnic origins of Khalil Rabah’s preoccupation with boundaries and containment, his work engages with more conceptual and universal questions relating to the shifting borders of narrative, history and space.

In mandla’s work, identity-based struggles emerge from the artist’s attempts to reconcile different forms of exclusion, both within the artist’s family and adoptive environment.

Set in the lush Rif mountains of northern Morocco, As They Say spans the length of a weekend camping trip where a father and his son hike in a forest to fish in a beautiful lake.

Astrid Klein is best known for her large-format black and white ‘photoworks’—composite images comprised of magazine and newspaper photographs subjected to different printing and processing techniques in the darkroom.

AT THE RISK OF THE REAL (2015) expands on Cinthia Marcelle’s engagement with labour, industrial production and the reciprocity between art and daily life.

Through videos, drawings, installations and public interventions, the work of Alia Farid explores contemporary urban life against the background of the complex colonial histories of Kuwait and Puerto Rico, her two countries of origin.

Keywords: videotaped in Beirut’s central district circa 2000; Toufican ruins; labyrinth; drive (also in the sense of Trieb).

Autoconstrucción, or ‘self-building’, is an ongoing body of work by Abraham Cruzvillegas that consists of structures in a constant state of construction, destruction, rebuilding and open-ended motion.

Autoxylopyrocycloboros documents a performance or, perhaps better, an action that took place on, and ultimately in, the waters of Loch Long on the West Coast of Scotland.

Kimathi Donkor reimagines mythic, historical and everyday encounters across Africa and its global diasporas, addressing the erasure of Black subjectivity and Black historical figures from western canonical art history.

Alongside works entitled Entropy and Dark Matter, David Spriggs presented the large site-specific installation Axis of Power at Sharjah Biennial 9.

Ángela Ponce’s photography grapples with social issues, political conflicts, disability rights and collective memory in the Latin American context.

An Indigenous artist and member of the Lac Seul First Nation, Rebecca Belmore’s art focuses on land use, resource allocation, climate change and displacement.

The ongoing construction of the ‘Defense Barrier’ in Palestine continues to cause worldwide outrage.

Destiny Deacon is a multidisciplinary Indigenous artist descended from the KuKu Yalanji and Erub/Mer peoples of Far North Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands respectively.

Queenie McKenzie (1915–1998) depicted the Aboriginal experience through bold autobiographical canvases that offer insight into life on the remote cattle stations of the East Kimberley region in early twentieth-century Australia.

Spanning nearly five decades, Barbara Kasten’s conceptual practice has centred around photography and an exploration of the nature of perception, often manifested through the interplay of two- and three-dimensional spaces.

Vikram Divecha’s work develops around ‘found processes’—those existing forces at work within state, social, economic and industrial spheres that go largely overlooked.

The practice of Adrián Villar Rojas is marked by large-scale, site-specific interventions that incorporate his fascinations with battling ecosystems, physical decay, unlikely rebirth and man’s interference in it all.

First shown in Sharjah Biennial 7 and now part of the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, Beirut Caoutchouc is one of Rechmaoui’s best known works.

This project proposes possible reconciliations between the task of the archaeologist and that of the poet, between modern images and ancient texts.

The earth is no longer mere land: it is the sociopolitical terrain of our species.

For SB13, Taloi Havini explores a form of shell-based currency known as beroana, which was used on Buka Island in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.

Sometimes, there’s this thing where I almost feel like . . . I see especially Africans, . . . that I almost see them as though I’m white myself.

In a practice spanning some 40 years, İnci Eviner has explored the perspective of women, processes of organisation and the formation of subjectivities.

In his new body of works Ramin Haerizade depicts multiple reproductions of the self, as fractured, mirrored, morphed, amorphous, cross-gendered, bestial, a Kafkaesque indeterminate creature with a distinctly evolved phallicism.

Theaster Gates is a visual artist, archivist, curator and musician whose practice explores Black identity and history through material investigations into labour, spirituality, vacancy and spatiality.

Malullah works with installation, photography and video often investigating the new roles being adopted by contemporary Islamic woman.

Red organic forms highlighted with strokes of white paint gently swarm across the courtyard of Beit Al Serkal.

This installation includes a video that documents a collaborative performance by Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton at DESTE Foundation Project Space on the island of Hydra, Greece, in 2009, as well as elements that were first exhibited there.

Zhou Tao’s videos explore means to create a dialogue between moving images, addressing the inner workings of systems and topologies through careful study of specific events in manifold perspective.

Marwan Rechmaoui approaches the methodical study of cartography and urbanisation through works tempered by sensuality and wit.

For her SB13 commission, Boundary Work (2017), Mandy El-Sayegh assembles new and previous works, presenting a concatenation of materials.

Lida Abdul’s “Brick Sellers of Kabul” approaches the complex process of reconstruction in Afghanistan, producing a subtle reflection that could be perceived and considered as a comment on social negotiation and transformation.

Anju Dodiya’s visual language encompasses references spanning the cross-cultural history of painting, from Indian miniatures to French medieval tapestries, alongside elements of autobiography, allegory and mythology.

Bronze Revirado shows festive bell ringing in a church tower in São João del Rey, Minas Gerais.

We propose a temporary pavilion for Calligraphy Square in Sharjah, consisting of transparent bubbles.

Driven by the collisions and interactions arising from colonialism, artist and scholar Brook Andrew combats historical amnesia and questions the limitations of power structures in institutional spaces.

Barbara Walker’s figurative art practice interrogates past and contemporary manifestations of issues at the intersection of racial identity, belonging, class, power and body politics.

Shot with Black and White Negra 120 negative expired in 1976

Takashi Ishida is perhaps best known for his ‘drawing animation’, a technique in which he creates lines by hand and then shoots them one frame at a time.

Cairo Stories… continues an on-going series of ‘as-told-to’ recorded stories, based on personal interviews.