Sharjah Biennial 10: Plot for a Biennial

Fateh Moudarres is widely considered to be one of Syria and the Arab world’s seminal modernists.

Figures intertwine, almost floating, while recurring images of faces recall Zayat’s other endeavour – conservator and restorer of orthodox icons.

Considered among the most accomplished Arab painters and printmakers, Ziad Dalloul has been captivated with natures mortes, or still life, noting that the English word describes his practice more faithfully than the French one.

In the late nineteenth century, trade cards – long used by merchants to advertise their businesses – became what we today know as ‘trading cards’.

A Dream of Warsaw documents the work leading up to an exhibition by Polish architect, urban planner, theorist and teacher Oskar Hansen.

Installation in collaboration with Neda Saeedi.

A Love Story is a miniature narrative in four acts where time becomes fluid as the image is distilled to its inner self.

Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon are prohibited from practicing more than seventy professions, except, fortunately, art.

A Typology of Houses is a descriptive record of culture made manifest in the building vernacular of residential housing in Dubai.

Two thirty-five-minute videos assemble sequences borrowed from news reports from the archives of Soviet Television in the last century.

Matt Saunders scuttles boundaries between media to make works that balance between the painted and the photographic.

The Neighbour Before the House is a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem.

Set in the lush Rif mountains of northern Morocco, As They Say spans the length of a weekend camping trip where a father and his son hike in a forest to fish in a beautiful lake.

In his new body of works Ramin Haerizade depicts multiple reproductions of the self, as fractured, mirrored, morphed, amorphous, cross-gendered, bestial, a Kafkaesque indeterminate creature with a distinctly evolved phallicism.

Red organic forms highlighted with strokes of white paint gently swarm across the courtyard of Beit Al Serkal.

Shot with Black and White Negra 120 negative expired in 1976

Cairo Stories… continues an on-going series of ‘as-told-to’ recorded stories, based on personal interviews.

In 1989, Hans Haacke was invited to participate in a competition for a work celebrating the bicentennial of the Assemblée Nationale.

Camar Cande’s Journey chronicles a trek Abdullah Al Saadi took through the northern region of the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Ziad Dalloul's earthen palette, recalling memories of the lands of his childhood in Syria and Algeria, is the artist’s spiritual reckoning of thinking the past in the present.

DAYS, I See what I Saw and what I will See explores the notion of producing a continuous representation of space and a discontinuous representation of time – at the same time.

In this work six separate sheets of hand-cut paper show carvings of Arabic script. Arabic is the first spoken language of nearly 300 million people.

Gilbert Hage’s Eleven Views of Mount Ararat appears in the context of various houses of members of the Armenian community of Lebanon.

Execution Squares (2008) depicts public squares in three Syrian cities–Aleppo, Latakia and Damascus–where public execution occurred and in some cases, continues.

Face Scripting is a story, that ghosts the Dubai Police’s forensic film. It rehearses the generic architectural syntax of hotel rooms, corridors and lobbies – those thresholds of blank transition.

An exterior territory is necessary to resolve conflicts. Problems are never resolved face to face.

'Devoid of pitiful moralising and surpassing fetishistic infatuation with depictions of human sordidness, in the series Fictionville Rokni Haerizadeh cunningly (and controversially) violates and perverts found photographic media images depicting human suffering into an anthropomorphic Orwellian world of fairytales: humourous,grotesque, satirical, bitter.'

From 17th century Sarmatism, the dominant ideology amongst the Polish nobility, to monobrows in America and the Green movement in presentday Iran, Friendship of Nations traces an ambitious if unlikely genealogy between Iran and Poland.

The project of a 3D (stereoscopic) film by Armin Linke and Francesco Mattuzzi completed with the visual effects created by Francesco Siddi refers to the 19th century invention of stereoscopic technology.

The Sharjah Cricket Stadium was built in 1981 by an Emirati entrepreneur upon his return home from studying in Pakistan.

Installation in collaboration with Neda Saeedi.

Michael Bears’s illustrations, cast in the vocabulary of graphic novels are a map of DAAR’s networks and origin of projects.

In Praise of Letters is a manifesto by Samir Sayegh, one of the most accomplished and innovative visual artists working with the form and discourse of calligraphy.

Over the past decade Walid Raad has been fascinated by the emergence of new art museums, galleries, schools and cultural foundations in Arab cities, by way of which the makers, sponsors, consumers, forms and histories of Arab art are becoming more and more visible.

It’s not my memory of it is a documentary based on interviews conducted in 2000 with people who manage intelligence information in the US government.

Javad Yassari rose to fame in the late 1970s in Lalezar, Tehran’s club strip where he sang in smoky theatres and cabarets.

Through Aisha Khalid’s labour-intensive process of inserting pins through a layer of two shawls, Kashmiri Shawl inspires contradictory responses.

In 2004, Jean-Luc Moulène notices a stalk of Paulownia growing through a crack in the asphalt in Paris, next to the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry building, which spans nos 121 to 135 rue de Bercy.

Lament of the Images is a philosophical essay on representation

The installation explores the thickness of the boundaries, and follows it along edges of villages and towns, across fields, orchards, roads, gardens, kindergartens, fences, terraces, homes, public buildings, a football stadium, a mosque and finally a large recently built castle.

Jem Cohen and Luc Sante were invited to Tangier to collaborate on a short film in a city where neither had ever been.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul produced Le Jardin de Ma Mère in response to an invitation by Eric Troncy, who, with Victoire de Castellane, designed a collection of jewelry for Christian Dior.

In the early 1960s, a group of students led by professor of mathematics Manoug Manougian at the Armenian Haigazian University in Lebanon designed and launched rockets for the purpose of exploring and studying space.

Lydda Airport is a short film named after the facility built in 1930 in what was then known as the British Mandate of Palestine.

Maportaliche/ It has no importance is a mixed-media installation of a patchwork of words, texts, short descriptions in languages from the artist’s lived socio-linguistic reality in Algeria as well as from his world of literary and theatrical production.

Imran Qureshi painted this series of portraits when he realised that after 9/11, the world insisted on segregating religious people.

In this new creation, Omar Rajeh looks into the body; more precisely, he attempts to deconstruct, alienate, re-discover, and question our perception of the human body system today.

Houman Mortazavi is a Tehran based multi-media artist whose practice is remarkably versatile.

All that remains from Rashid Ghossein and Mariam Hamadeh’s relationship is a large collection of messages recorded over a period of ten years on audiocassettes.

The encyclopaedia is a monumental work of instruction, aiming to treat everything that can be learned by a person in his or her lifetime.

Night Journey follows stories of pilgrimage and devotional practice and focuses on the symbols and instruments of communication or communion with and between the supernatural and mankind.

Not a matter of if but when was developed in 2005-2006 in Damascus, Syria.

In Aisha Khalid’s Pattern to Follow series, the artist devises a contemporary approach to painting classical Islamic geometric patterns.

Kamran Shirdel is considered one of the pioneers of the social documentary.

These intermixed photographs of Tangier, and Cohen’s home city, New York, all originated as three-inch-square polaroids – a discontinued format.

'The subjects all chose their own elements to represent and identify them in the form of a tattoo superimposed on their portraits.' Marie Hélène Cauvin

Borrowing elements from Palestinian folk belief and superstition, Quest for Spouse directs its attention to magic, healing, play and longing.

Almagul Menlibayeva and Bahar Behbahani explore the dialogue between two ancient cultures that border the Caspian Sea on the crossroads of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Jorge Tacla’s Escombros series (signifying 'rubble' or 'debris' in Spanish) depicts a bombed-out cityscape inspired from photographs of Beirut after the July 2006 Israeli War.

An increasingly established painter in the Iranian scene, Shohreh Mehran’s practice subverts representation and seeing.

Simone Fattal’s practice has always been informed by war and its historical contexts.

The Spartan scytale is the communication tool that does the most harm to the universality of language.

The Sharjah InfoCart is a mobile kiosk that traveled to malls and outdoor public places in Sharjah including Al Qasba, Sahara Centre Mall, Rolla, and Al-Jubail bus station, during January and February 2011.

The areesh, a traditional Emirati palm shelter used as housing until the 1950s, functions in Shelter for a New Youth to provide protection from the sun.

Rania Attieh is from Tripoli, Lebanon. She is an MFA graduate in Media Art Production as a writer/director of fiction from the City College of New York.

Both his etchings and charcoal drawings are carvings of light from within darkness, representations of silence.

Doug Ashford is a New York based artist, teacher and writer whose work considers exhibition, display and other social production as formal models for speculation and reconsideration.

Considered to be among the most accomplished Arab painters and printmakers, Dalloul’s works merge contemporary disciplines with traditional materials such as ink, sepia and handmade paper.

Two hundred and thirty five individual drawings depicting the pages of George Orwell’s novel 1984.

Sunny Lane is Sonnenallee in German, a famous street in the south west of Berlin, home to a large number of Arab immigrants.

Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’ practice is infused with a long-standing desire to make language visible.

'In the eyes of the Islamist terrorists I belonged to the hateful category of the tagh’out' – a traitor to the cause of God.

Portraits of the artists shot in studios in Beirut, Damascus, Cairo and Sharjah.

The Book of Profanation, exhibited here for the first time as an experimental prototype, is a compendium of recent projects by Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR).

The Evolution of the Angel in Line with the State of Exception, features a series of photos that act as portraits of angels.

Josephine Meckseper evokes an apocalyptic retail environment within this installation

The Mapping Journey Project is a mixed-media installation that combines eight video works and a printed map.

Doug Ashford is a New York based artist, teacher and writer whose work considers exhibition, display and other social production as formal models for speculation and reconsideration.

In 1979, Samir Ghosseini’s Hasna’ wa ‘Amaliqa (The Beauty and the Giants) premiered in Beirut, marking the launch of the Lebanese action cinema genre.

This sculpture is a reproduction of an imaginary torso of a spiritual substant the homos-angelus - an angel whose anatomical skeleton resembles a multi-winged human being.

Anna Boghiguian’s project is about migration, whether of goods and ideas or the movement of people in global labour markets.

Notebooks of Z.A.B. She was my grandmother and was illiterate. She gave birth to twelve children, of whom ten lived. To keep in touch with them all she made herself a telephone directory from an old recipe notebook...

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni is an attempt to tell the story of Soad Hosni, one of Egypt’s most famous film stars who starred in eighty-two feature films between 1959 and 1991.

An ode to the thousands struggling for democracy in Burma.

For The Trespassers, Mariam Ghani hired Afghan-Americans who had previously worked as translators for the US military in Afghanistan, translating documents related to US military prisons in Afghanistan.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer and artist working in Dhaka and New York. His essays, films and photography explore the theme of failed utopias.

Their Dreams is a work inspired from children's stories of their dreams about what they could be and what they hope to receive from the world.

A late-night chat between two former lovers who have not been in contact for ten years transforms into a compelling elegy of loss and longing.

Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’ practice is infused with a long-standing desire to make language visible.

Malika lives a double life. By day, she is a conservatively dressed student and call-centre worker,who lives with her parents in the old kasbah of Tangier.

These three Untitled paintings are the beginnings of a new, yet to be finished series, inspired from photographs that have appeared in the press during the 2009 elections.

Vicarious Dreams consists of seven landscapes based on photographs of construction digs that Hatem Imam has been taking in Beirut since 2009.

Videograms of a Revolution assembles video footage of the Romanian revolution recorded at the end of 1989.

In the 1970s, Moroccan schoolboys and students dreamed of freedom and democracy.

Who Killed the King of Disco is a multi-media installation exploring the conflicting facts and context surrounding the artist’s father’s murder.

In Women’s Circles the artist worked with a dancer to perform a series of movements; a photographer has captured each movement as a series of frozen moments.

Each painting in the installation You and Me (constructing identity) plays in an autoreferential cycle that constantly hovers between the perception of the part and the whole.