Sharjah Biennial 16

Mame-Diarra Niang’s photographic work abstracts, fragments and decontextualises landscapes and portraits relating to her ancestral roots and Senegalese- Ivorian-French upbringing. Niang’s interrelated photographic series dwell on memory, selfhood and race.

In 1989, Hans Haacke was invited to participate in a competition for a work celebrating the bicentennial of the Assemblée Nationale.

Camar Cande’s Journey chronicles a trek Abdullah Al Saadi took through the northern region of the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Cao Fei is a multimedia artist whose photography, performance, video and digital media works are often viewed as social commentary on the constant and rapid change occurring in China.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s research-based work is concerned with the socio- and geopolitical implications of modes of world-making.

For SB14, Martiel presents two commissioned projects that further his research on the African diaspora, systems of value and cultural histories.

'In this video, I constantly roll in and out of an old Dagestani carpet, known as a kilim. The carpet’s design symbolises the Garden of Eden.'
Taus Makhacheva

Colourful lines and dots are then added, using ink and oil, which are coded as in a map’s legend to indicate important information that is hidden.

Ziad Dalloul's earthen palette, recalling memories of the lands of his childhood in Syria and Algeria, is the artist’s spiritual reckoning of thinking the past in the present.

Chalks and Pins and Charcoal make up a sort of tapestry made from multicoloured pieces of chalk and black charcoal lined up in horizontal and diagonal rows.

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist whose upbringing in post- Soviet Uzbekistan and engagement with the region continue to drive her practice. Ismailova’s filmography addresses themes of national memory, women’s sovereignty, ritualism and mortality.

The process of writing Chinese ideograms, which originated over two thousand years ago, is governed by strict rules.

In many of Ghassan Salhab’s films, ‘travel’ serves as a foil for other kinds of ‘transport’ that circumnavigate intention, orientation and linear temporality.

Reena Saini Kallat’s practice examines ongoing civilisational affinities of language, culture, trade and technology that transcend the superficial divisions of nation-state boundaries.

In video, drawing, installation and participatory projects, Roslisham Ismail (aka Ise) employs expressions of popular vernacular with an eye toward unpacking the complex, and often alternative, cultural roots of a place.

Among the first artists to be educated in Korea after its liberation from Japanese occupation, Chung Chang-Sup was part of a generation of artists who transformed the future of contemporary art in Korea.

The projects that I develop promote social interaction with authority and the structures of power in society.

'Domes appear as an element in architecture throughout the world.'
Zeinab Alhashemi

Each performer is presented in a reenactment of his or her normal performance situation, and an abstract cacophony is generated from their combined music.

City Language III is the third part of a video trilogy conceived as an experimental sound portrait of Istanbul.

Dan Peterman has been working since the mid-1980s as both an artist and an activist on the explosive intersection of ecology and aesthetics.

SOI is a collective group of artists, designers and architects from Bangkok and Tokyo.

As an artist and researcher, Antariksa has focused on the history of Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia during World War II, 1941-1945.

Working across the fields of art, design and architecture, Rain Wu’s practice often involves interactive spatial experiences.

For SB12, Danh Vo assembles the thirteen parts that comprise the Statue of Liberty's ‘armpit’, which towers nine metres high.

Waheeda Malullah’s practice examines the socialised norms of Bahraini society and the wider Arabian Gulf through a playful,
performative lens.

Rheim Alkadhi’s new commission, Communications From the Field of Contact (Each Hair is a Tongue) (2015), attempts to provide a framework by which to contemplate new cultural intimacies.

A fog sculpture in a courtyard, composition invites bright sunlight to mingle in a mystical, cloudlike space.

In both his work and practice, Oscar Murillo has sought to account for the position of body and being within increasingly impersonal circuits of production, consumption, confinement and cultural hegemony.

The work explores the idea of construction and destruction through the use of black and white symbolism to create a work space suggesting the opposition and complementarity between these two contrasts (the black and the white) as well as the degree of the influence of these relationships, whether complementary or opposing, on our lives, futures, environments, and societies.

Bogosi Sekhukhuni is a self-proclaimed ‘lightworker and creative director’. He is a multimedia artist working with paintings, drawings, sculptures and videos to address the interaction between identity and consumption, both within the South African and global context.

The video and the book tell three stories inspired by his daily life, describing alleged conspiracies and attempting to draw in the viewer.

I grew up in a different Cairo, the Cairo of the late sixties and seventies; at that time, to me as a child, people looked different, dressed differently, talked differently, and strangely enough, behaved differently.

In a long corridor-like room at Bait Al Serkal, another Heritage Area building, seven doors opening onto the veranda have been replaced with coloured screens.

Conversion is an installation that plays with this natural source of light by covering the courtyard with a metal structure made up of pivoting panels of coloured filters.

Cory Arcangel is a multimedia artist whose interest in digitals-technology-based art developed as a result of natural inclination and the advent of computers and the Internet.

Yulia Grigoryants uses photography to document the harsh reality of displacement, unrest and extreme poverty in conflict zones and border regions, especially as experienced
by ethnic minorities.

The recorded percussive sounds were performed by hand, reflecting the artist’s desire to connect 'audio ornamentation' with handmade visual ornamentation

Prajakta Potnis examines the imprint of social, economic and political systems on the body and psyche of the individual.

Monira Al Qadiri uses myth-making and fantasy to excavate dormant alternative worlds and potential futures.

An artist’s imagination, creativity, and transversely off- centre position leave behind a circumstantial trace that is linked to the artist’s own individual sphere of influence.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.

Tania El Khoury is a live performance artist whose works engage the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of migration, displacement and state violence.

New Red Order engages with a network of collaborators to produce video, performance and installation works that challenge contemporary colonial strategies and examine obstacles to Indigenous growth.

Heather Phillipson’s work often appears as associational clusters, organised spatially, that combine single- and multi-screen videos, mass-produced objects, web images, audio loops, written and oral texts, and physical and digital graphics.

Cyprus features a wooden boat that the artist’s father rented twenty-nine years ago in a clandestine attempt to flee Lebanon with his family.

Siebren Versteeg is a multi-media artist who creates interactive installations by processing digital information, generating codes, manipulating algorithms and allowing the computer to create artworks from images it pulls from the internet on subjects specified by the artist.

DAYS, I See what I Saw and what I will See explores the notion of producing a continuous representation of space and a discontinuous representation of time – at the same time.

De-miners 1 is part of the series Found Objects, which depicts different cluster munitions that were collected after the 2006 war on Lebanon, as well as the crews that gathered them.

In her performance, Death is Certain, Eva Meyer-Keller uses sweet cherries as her protagonists.

In this work six separate sheets of hand-cut paper show carvings of Arabic script. Arabic is the first spoken language of nearly 300 million people.

Yinka Shonibare’s practice is situated in conversation with the growing activism around the decolonisation of public spaces
and the reorientation of historical education

Performances often exist only in closed institutional spaces, never reaching a secondary audience.

Deniz Gul’s work examines the dynamics of power, appearance and representations through objects, language and the symbolic.

Desert of Pharan documents the rapid development of Islam’s holiest city, takes its title from the ancient name of the region surrounding Makkah (Mecca).

Dictums 10:120 is a multi-part project that involves the composition and performance of a qawwali song.

Candice Breitz has spent the last twenty years reflecting on the impact of moving images within a variety of social and political contexts.

Dilbar is a portrait of a city builder, one of a million Bangladeshi workers currently living in the United Arab Emirates.

Guan Xiao is a multi-media artist working primarily with video and sculpture. She is known for her installations based on references from ancient Eastern and Western traditions and contemporary popular culture as well as her comparisons of the future and the past, and the crude and the high-tech.

Wafaa Bilal is known internationally for his online performative and interactive works that stimulate dialogue about international and interpersonal politics.

In Domestic Tourism II, Maha Maamoun explores how the ‘timeless’ image of the Egyptian pyramids - projected by the tourism industry.

This dichotomy or battle of the opposites encompasses the human condition as a whole and exposes our universal values together with our detestable errors.

If a line of kids leaves Europe and heads towards Morocco, and a line of kids leaves Africa and heads towards Spain, will the two lines meet in the chimera of the horizon?

Working with drawing that is transformed by text, installation, photography or video, Ali Eyal’s practice examines feelings of absence and dissonance in response to armed conflict.

Lubaina Himid’s artistic and curatorial practice illuminates the omissions and hypocrisies of western colonial histories, centring the contributions of marginalised figures, particularly Black individuals, to cultural life in Europe.

I collect found objects and use them as the basis for my installations and drawings.
Fumito Urabe

Tabor Robak employs computer-generated imaging to create videos of invented worlds. Working with programs such as Unity, After Effects, Photoshop and Cinema 4D, the artist explores a secondary digital reality, rendered in what he calls a ‘Photoshop tutorial aesthetic’ or a ‘desktop screensaver aesthetic’.

On my first visit to Sharjah, I came with very little knowledge about the cultural and physical nature of life in this part of the world.

Hind Mezaina’s work delves into themes of cultural memory, change and the notion of heritage.

Dubai is a city of superlatives that includes the largest, the highest, and the most expensive.

Collecting and repurposing found objects, Nari Ward grapples with social and political issues surrounding race, poverty and consumer culture via metaphor and juxtaposition.

Efface: Death Becomes Her is a body of work that examines eternal grief as a continuum between a desired state and the imminent and natural occurrence of death.

Drawing from the visual languages of Pop and conceptual art, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s multidisciplinary work emerges from inquiries into urban vernacular creativity and the role of popular media in shaping notions of borders and identity.

For SB14, Eisa Jocson focuses on the Overseas Filipino Musician (OFM), a term describing those who perform Western music for audiences at hotels, restaurants, clubs and theme parks throughout Asia and the Middle East.

Gilbert Hage’s Eleven Views of Mount Ararat appears in the context of various houses of members of the Armenian community of Lebanon.

Central to Em’kal Eyongakpa’s practice is the quest for negotiations between ‘life’ sciences, art, 'juju’ and technology, with interwoven installations, performances and soundscapes that not only blur the boundaries between employed media but could also alter notions of the real and the illusory.

Ian Cheng is best known for his computer-generated simulations and live episodic works that employ programming to explore notions of world-making, social transformation, and human and non-human agency and consciousness.

Enclosed revisits the extraordinary history of a monument located in the heart of Algiers.

Shezad Dawood’s work often charts exploratory narratives that draw on historical cosmologies to forge interconnections across far-reaching lines of enquiry, geographic locations and communities.

End of Dreams is a work in various media: sculptural installation, video, audio and photography.

The long-term project , YOVO! YOVO!’s first collective work, draws on the theorist Timothy Mitchell’s concept of 'enframing'.

This piece came to me when I was in the Sharjah desert. I saw a mirage that I couldn’t understand.

Ahmad Fuad Osman’s work often explores abuse of power and historical amnesia in order to challenge canonical narratives.

Envelope (2017) is a decommissioned hot air balloon that is occasionally inflated with buoyant air.

Through painting, Etel Adnan conveys her private relationship to nature as living subject, each painting an ‘expression of an encounter’.

Artist duo Eva & Franco Mattes have been making art together since they met in Berlin in 1994. Their work analyses and responds to contemporary digital life, approaching its ethics and politics with dark humour. Considered pioneers of the Net Art movement, they describe themselves as pranksters and hacktivists, and their work inhabits the web, often as argumentative and semi-legal interventions.

Caecilia Tripp’s work is rooted in collaborative practice and the development of dialogic imagination as a form of celebration of togetherness and shared futures.

In contrast to the large scale of Shadow Sites I and II, Excavators is shown on a tiny monitor and focuses on a group of industrious ants working in the sand.

When urban foxes are accidentally attracted to a photo- shoot by slices of sausage, when flies write poetic scores on panes of glass, or quite normal street-lamps do not switch on until someone passes them, then the young Danish artist Tue Greenfort is at work.

Execution Squares (2008) depicts public squares in three Syrian cities–Aleppo, Latakia and Damascus–where public execution occurred and in some cases, continues.

Nil Yalter’s works offer a compelling feminist viewpoint on the socioeconomic conditions that affect migratory populations and female labourers.

Will new flowers blossom from the existing rotten system? Can we remain independent, capable of adding value? If not, then what shall we do?

I never let my self get in the way of a good idea.

David Hammons interrogates the political and social landscape
of the United States through its material remnants.

Artist and television producer Nesrine Khodr works in moving image, print and performance.

Mohamed Abdelkarim engages with notions of authorship and representation, camouflage and concealment, exchange and play.

Monika Sosnowska’s work is informed by the architectural landscape of Warsaw.

Face Scripting is a story, that ghosts the Dubai Police’s forensic film. It rehearses the generic architectural syntax of hotel rooms, corridors and lobbies – those thresholds of blank transition.

Faces reflects Beirut in which people are constantly observed by images of the dead.

This video project explores human relations as they relate to race, gender, language, culture, and social background.

My work talks about the cradle of humanity contaminated, about the African continent as the world’s garbage bin.

For over four decades, Fathi Afifi’s practice has been equally concerned with both human and
machine, as well as their synergistic lockstep.

Fahrelnissa Zeid practice is marked by her monumental abstract works from the late 1940s–60s influenced by stained glass and mosaic design

Falling Rope was initially inspired by a 1907 photograph by Herbert Ponting of Shiraito (literally, 'falling string') Waterfall, in Fujinomiya, with Mount Fuji in the background.

Familie Tezcan is a video portrait of a German family of Turkish origin breakdancing and singing in four different languages – Turkish, Arabic, German and English

An exterior territory is necessary to resolve conflicts. Problems are never resolved face to face.

Papy Ebotani’s Fanfare funérailles [Funeral brass] (2014) explores a new type of funerary procession that has emerged in the urban centres of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Drawing on the long, rich history of publishing in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa (EMNA) and the diaspora, Fehras Publishing Practices considers the stakes of contemporary publishing in and beyond print culture.

Heri Dono’s paintings and installations merge imagination and Indonesian folk traditions with politics and modern art.

'Devoid of pitiful moralising and surpassing fetishistic infatuation with depictions of human sordidness, in the series Fictionville Rokni Haerizadeh cunningly (and controversially) violates and perverts found photographic media images depicting human suffering into an anthropomorphic Orwellian world of fairytales: humourous,grotesque, satirical, bitter.'

Mario García Torres examines processes of re-enactment and restaging in his interrogations of singular authorship, presence and responsibility.

The immense wealth from geological deposits of petroleum generated in the past century, and possibly still generated for another century

I work from or within the urban environment, using mainly weeds and flowers to examine various ideas: plants looked at but not seen, forgotten in the backdrops of the everyday, inhabiting places that are usually neglected or unexplored.

As one of the persecuted Hazara people of Afghanistan, Khadim Ali explores the symbols, characters, language and image-making defined and redefined across the history of his culture of origin.

For this work, Maider López marked out a football field with painted lines across the middle of the main public square of the Sharjah Art Area.

Liliana Porter’s Forced Labor (Red Sand) follows a series of the Artist’s installations that display miniature figurines undertaking everyday yet seemingly insurmountable tasks.

As an artist, writer and video essayist, Ursula Biemann’s research and work examine the interrelated ecologies of oil, forest, ice and water through the lens of climate change.

Saddam Al Jumaily’s surreal compositions operate as metaphors of anxiety, loss and suffering, underscoring the ways in which
the chaos of war in his native Iraq has destabilised time, meaning and belonging.

Mona Hatoum strips themes of conflict, exile, barriers and state control from the purely conceptual realm, presenting them instead in their manifestations as lived experiences.

Maider Lopez installed a drinking fountain in the main square of Sharjah Art Area, which the Artist saw as a useful addition for the people who live there.

Liliana Porter’s film Fox in the Mirror captures a bizarre and fantastical concert that features a number of familiar figurines that appear repeatedly in her work.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani investigate collective memory and perceptions of social and political turmoil through the lens of transitory public spaces and the built environment.

From 17th century Sarmatism, the dominant ideology amongst the Polish nobility, to monobrows in America and the Green movement in presentday Iran, Friendship of Nations traces an ambitious if unlikely genealogy between Iran and Poland.

A wooden construction built by a few people in coastal Gujarat can pass through or touch a remarkable number of ideologies, winds, pirates and navies, sanctions and treasures, fears and wants, and forms of boredom and play.

The Bargau Valley in Northeastern Transylvania provides the setting for much of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897).

FUGERE (A Series of Olympiadic Moments) is an exploration into the strangeness of the realm of professional sport.

The project of a 3D (stereoscopic) film by Armin Linke and Francesco Mattuzzi completed with the visual effects created by Francesco Siddi refers to the 19th century invention of stereoscopic technology.

Futurefarmers is an international collective of artists, activists, farmers and architects.

Gamsutl is an ancient Avarian settlement carved out of the mountains in Dagestan.

Bahar Behbahani’s research-based practice interweaves archival materials, cartography, horticultural history and contemporary context to critique imperial structures of knowledge and power.

Karin Sander’s German National Women's Soccer Team 1:7,7 is a scaled-down exact replica of each member of the 2005 German national women’s soccer team.

It is a sign – or a nemesis – of our times that one cannot easily isolate, abstract or purify the qualities from the defects, the lights from the shadows.