Sharjah Biennial 8
Still Life: Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Change

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

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.

Personal responsibility is what is most important for the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

In the 1970s, especially after “documenta 5” in 1972 curated by Harald Szeemann, large-sized hyperrealistic group-portrait paintings featuring Bohemian hippy scenes had brought an international reputation to Franz Gertsch.

I want to question urban planning through the study of places that escape a fixed definition of a city or of architecture: empty lots, wastelands, buildings before, during and after their demolition; places which, due to forgetfulness or lack of interest, escape a defined design and are open to all kinds of possibilities.

For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the "eye of the storm".

In my country, Nigeria, many people rely on sachet water (popularly called “pure water”) because of the lack of good drinking water.

Hatoum’s work is an outstanding example of the interweaving of ethical, political and aesthetic issues, whose beauty lies in the wit, economy, risk-taking and even mischief-making with which these issues are conflated...

I use drawing to organise knowledge.

Our very first work together was already our last.

One day, I met dressed camels in a desert.

The Past, the Present and the Future.

In an Irregular Configuration. Rapid changes: complex, turbulent, unpredictable.

They were different tribes. They did have one thing in common, I heard from his story.

Around 1990, I began to photograph my local surroundings.

The first issue is to try and stay focused on the matters of survival.

The two photomontages Perfumes & Bazaar and Justice for the mother are trompe l'oeils of walls in a living-room covered with wallpaper showing on one side a teeming garden of earthly delights and on the other a jungle.

My son and I would ride our bicycles to this mountainous area in Khor Fakkan and there we made these six different- sized circles.

In the art of Maha Mustafa a tension appears physically between what you might call a "meteorological" and a "geological" perspective.

Some years ago I received an invitation card in the mail from a gallery in New York (Matthew Marks; it was an invitation to an exhibition by a young artist by the name of Peter Cain.

Having trained in sculpture at Chitrakala Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, Ranjani Shettar creates three-dimensional works that explore the confrontation of the urban and the organic, the metaphysical and the mundane.

In November 2006, as I was flying back from Dubai to Frankfurt, images appeared in my mind: buildings, grid structures, high-reflecting glass, in blue and green everywhere.

If you want a sense of how utterly alive Africa is today, culturally and politically, listen to its popular music.

In the Russian language the word for “creative work” (“tvorchestvo”) shares a root with the word for “Creator” (“Tvorets”).

I try, always try, to create a space where I can probe my identities vis-á-vis the world around me.

What you see and what you hear often differ a lot.

Since the dawn of time nature has found a way to balance all its elements in order to live in a state of equilibrium. This state is known to us as the ecosystem.

Once I found a mouldy old book abandoned on the lower shelves of a political science library.

The two photomontages Perfumes & Bazaar and Justice for the mother are trompe l'oeils of walls in a living-room covered with wallpaper showing on one side a teeming garden of earthly delights and on the other a jungle.

Brood was originally conceived by the artists as an army – ornithological stand-ins for a band of warfaring men.

"Power Station" is a series of 13 pairs of photographs recording the interiors of two buildings that have been neighbours for nearly 40 years.

Environment is the smoke humanity has laid on Nature: the people who used Latin had no word for Environment – they only knew natura.

In 2004, while still a student at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, Leopold Kessler installed a 1,200m long electric cable from his studio at the academy to his private apartment – for programmatic reasons and without seeking permission beforehand (Akademiekabel, 2004).

My work is a result of the different thoughts going on in my mind, or, what I would call the noises in my mind.

Roba Vecchia, The Wheel of Fortune, is a life-sized kaleidoscope which the viewer can enter and become a part of.

The title Saphir (French for sapphire) reflects this, evoking not only the pure maritime light typical of Algiers, but also those flickering glimmers on the horizon that symbolise people’s dreams and aspirations.

Humans can never be alike,
Nor can trees .
A man and a tree in this being form An entity with a unique quality!

Illumination Rig starts with a basic premise, turning money into light; it is in this sense an event, an occasion where consumption and transformation are made conspicuous.

Confident steps of youth, armed with knowledge and will, filled with determination and life, on a road fraught with difficulties, confusion and fear.

It is Benjamin who suggests that in order to truly know a society one has to look at the less privileged environs of its interstices, at the objects that are left behind as a result of human activity, at its waste and at the order that they represent or parody to some extent.

The documentaries of Taysir Batniji differ from sensationalised standard documentaries.

Filled with thousands of commands each second, our brains can no longer be surprised.

This garden is situated in one of the old courtyards of the heritage area in Sharjah.

I have been going on bike rides since 1992 - in the Emirates as well as in other places such as Japan, France, Scotland ... On these trips I make sketches of natural scenes and document them in my journals.

The invisible enemy should not exist, 2007 Michael Rakowitz’s most recent project, was originally conceived for a solo exhibition beginning of this year at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York City.

Over the past five years, we have realised a series of site- specific projects informed by the working concept Land Mark

MindBomb started as the street postering project of a group of artists and friends in 2002 in Cluj, Romania.

Art, for me, constitutes the language through which I discover the state of the human being and the contradictions he/she lives through in the shadow of the cultural conflicts between civilisations, and relating these to symbolic elements and concepts amongst these civilisations.

It is a savage world, Ahmed is aware of this.

I am wild about the public domain because we all own it; it is ours.

On seeing Touhami Ennadre’s work for the first time, you will be sure to experience strong feelings. You will not remain indifferent, calm.

My work explores the relationship between geological phenomena and daily life.

Several aspects are recurrent in the work of Michael Sailstorfer: the sculptural transformation of matter from one thing into another, the fascination with the laws of physics (and, ultimately, the construction of the universe), and the notion of mobility versus standstill – where the latter also translates into the notion of "home".

Underneath is a special project for the Sharjah Biennial 8 based on a former architectural work by Mounir Fatmi called Ovale Project, and a video entitled Horizontal Fall, showing the deconstruction of a building.

Abdul Rahman Al Ma’aini’s works are fields of visual signals painted with accuracy and precision.

The woman as a recurring subject in my installations or performance work is represented as living in a state of occupation.

To come in through the door of a museum and see 20 large, open buckets of white industrial paint on the floor is somewhat perplexing.

Developing works in an on-site manner, Dijkman reacts to a specific context by making temporary spatial shifts or adjustments to a given space.

The media I explore have certain things in common. They are sourced from my immediate environment.