Sharjah Biennial 9: Provisions for the Future
and Past of the Coming Days

Over the past few years, Iman Issa’s work has explored the contemporary relevance of objects, ideas and modes of communication that seemingly belong to another time.

Politcs, power relationships, sexuality and communication are often the focus of the work of Agnes Janich.

Visual artist and filmmaker Lamia Joreige uses archival documents and elements of fiction to reflect on the construction of historical narratives and the relationship between individual stories and collective memory.

Since the mid 1990s, Fernando José Pereira has used video to explore a range of interests that have recently focused on the remote territories of the extreme North.

Hayv Kahraman uses the visual languages of the Italian Renaissance, and the figurative style of traditional Japanese and Islamic art in intricately detailed paintings of women as they carry out the rituals of daily or celebratory life.

Abbas Kiarostami graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer.

Elena Kovylina uses a range of media including video, film, installation and performance in work that, while often brutal and satirical, explores and deconstructs notions of identity and addresses both the historical and contemporary impact of Russia's political and social structures.

Nikolaj Larsen uses a variety of materials and media to create work with a deeply humanistic engagement at its core.

My work is opposed to views that transmute into overviews and prejudices by forgetting or neglecting the complexity and the unique character of a context, region and situation. It is an attempt to express the impossibility and the uselessness of defining a point of view. Nadia Kaabi Linke

Maider López initially brought her interventions to Sharjah as part of the experimental residency Lab Project in 2007. It was during this residency that she first transformed the public square in the Arts Area by introducing the gridlines of a football pitch.

Working with video, drawing, photography and text, the work of José Luis Martinat is often characterised by the appropriation and then deconstruction and manipulation of pre-existing material.

Robert MacPherson used the rich and colourful culture of his rural childhood to address the environmental, colloquial and distinctive aspects of Australian landscape and language.

Lani Maestro has used a range of media including installation, sound, video, books and text to create work that explores the often complex dualities of human experience and the physical power of the natural world.

The work of Firoz Mahmud is an investigation into social, political and belief systems and their interaction with human reality, both historically and in the present.