March Meeting 2017

Introduction

Curated by Christine Tohme, Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj will span across five cities: Beirut, Dakar, Istanbul, Ramallah and Sharjah, with Artist Kader Attia, curators Lara Khaldi and Zeynep Oz and the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan as the four interlocutors of SB13. They will be working closely with researchers in the four cities, paired with counterparts in Sharjah to populate chip-ship, a centralised digital storage space housing various media, images and texts, addressing the four keywords water, earth, crops and culinary.

By cultivating collaborations, infrastructures and strategies within those localities, Tamawuj will pose questions around, and propose answers to, the conditions for the possibility of an art world. In a region currently being invested with larger institutions and lesser infrastructures, SB13 will cross from the ideal to the material. Vital interventions will stretch the idea of the biennial in order to traverse rooted contexts, harnessing the agility and fragility of present informal networks.

SAF welcomes applications from artists, writers and researchers for MM 2017. Interested applicants should present a proposal for a 10-minute presentation grounded in applicants’ area of expertise, relating to the conceptual framework of SB13.