Creating Dangerously: A Postscript to Sharjah Biennial 14

Overview

Creating Dangerously seeks to explore the various modes through which creativity and cultural production are enacted. Exploring the lines between the personal and the professional; the political and the social, this volume emerged from a series of collective conversations over the duration of Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber. This collection of essays, poems and thoughts is an extension of Omar Kholeif’s SB14 platforms, Making New Time and Create Dangerously.

Magnifying the hushed conversations and interludes in the project’s making, Creating Dangerously is not simply a document of outcomes, but rather of quiet realisation of reminiscences and prospects. Gathering key moments from the biennial that explore the resonant conversations that have emerged since its opening and closing, the publication acts as a postscript to the discursive qualities biennials provide to artists, curators, thinkers and the broader arts community.

Taking a cue from writers Albert Camus and Edwidge Danticat, Creating Dangerously reveals the power of a collective consciousness: what does it mean for artists and practitioners to gather as a collective force? How does one foster a social, political and economic infrastructure when it may seem to be lined up against you? How does one create spaces of solidarity in an era of fragmentation and diffusion? Creating Dangerously is a unique book coming together as one part theoretical reader and an intimate archival compilation by Kholeif which acts as a live retelling of the exhibition’s construction.

Contributions by Omar Kholeif with interventions from Tarek El Arris, Zoe Butt, Douglas Coupland, Chris McCormack, Blake Mitchell, Aram Moshayedi, Fatima Al Qasimi, Todd Reisz and Sofia Victorino.