Residency Programme

Resident Artists and Works

The residencies are often part of a long-term relationship with the Foundation, such as that of Danish artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, who was invited to show in the 2003 Biennial, and later returned for a residency in 2005. In the 9th Biennial he showed a video work Rendezvous (2009) where Keralan workers based in Sharjah and their families in India are projected onto adjacent screens. The physical and metaphorical distance between the workers and their families is a space full of love, devotion, hope, loss and longing. The work has since been acquired for the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection.

Lebanese Sound Artist Tarek Atoui’s residency in 2008 allowed him time to develop one of his most complex performances. This was premiered during the 9th Sharjah Biennial and later presented at the New Museum, NY, in 2009 and the Maison Rouge in Paris in 2010. Atoui is now working on a variety of educational projects for the Foundation.

Ziad Antar began randomly photographing the coast, he later worked to systematically document the coastline, Emirate by Emirate, completing the series. The resulting photographs portray the borders between each Emirate and the sea as a place of contact and engagement with the outside world. The work reveals traces of history drawn on the landscape as well as the recent past of these young countries that have been built upon trade and commerce.

Basma Alsharif’s work explores how we relate to and internalise the geo-political shifts that occur within our lifetimes and those we carry with us from past generations. Experimenting with multiple media, in single channel works as well as video installations, she uses the anonymous individual as a vehicle for navigating through political history and collective memory

In a move that highlights the historic exchange of labour and culture between the Gulf and South Asia, Wael Shawky travelled to Karachi to record the song with renowned qawwals Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad. Intrigued by the possibility of transcendence and role reversal, Shawky challenges the boundaries and expectations imposed by the traditions, power structures and hierarchies that exist in and out of the institution and society at large. The song was sung by the qawwals, along with thirty men in the opening week of Sharjah Biennial 11.

Verging on sound poetry, Tintin Wulia explores languages and their social perception as a kind of boundary, while peering into the hidden network of global nomadism across the borders which channels thousands of lives. Together with translations and readings by the esteemed Indonesian poet Landung Simatupang and emerging poetess Khairani Barokka, the poems are built into a rich composition of calls and responses from all different directions that interweaves sentiments, sounds and meanings through different languages.

The creation of two new works in Amman (Jordan) and Sharjah, where Kiluanji Kia Henda tells a story of a fictitious city by placing in the desert an iron sculpture, a fictional skyline of a city that never existed and invisible of its content, and the second a number of instructions on how to do build your own mega metropolis. Motivated by the explosive and uneven urban growth in many emergent cities, where architecture once again plays the most aggressive representation of social discrimination

Application Form

See previous related programmes and residency open calls below.

For more inquiries, contact residencies@sharjahart.org