I have always believed that calligraphy can have a dynamic effect on the way we see and understand the world.

In 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World, a list of numbered guidelines seem to be narrated by tulips with faces drawn on their petals.

Arabic calligraphy turns a phrase into an artwork by exploiting the expressive potential inherent in its forms.

Calligraphy enjoys the same expressive abilities as poetry, since all the arts are interrelated, each one paving the way for the other.

This video is based on materials from the personal archive of Jacques Chevallier, who was mayor of Algiers from 1953 to 1958, a key period in the architectural, social and political history of Algiers.

The artist writes the word ah in black ink on water.

Dressed like grown men, with glued-on moustaches and dubbed with the voices of adults, a group of boys retell a story by Egyptian writer Mohamed Mustagab.

Runa Islam counterpoints two lines of enquiry for Sharjah Biennial 11, utilising the exhibition space as a stage on which to culminate one series of works, and simultaneously to start another.

In the Arab world, where people are major consumers of technology but not involved in any aspect of its production, most individuals equate progress with the acquisition of modern equipment.

Keywords: videotaped in Beirut’s central district circa 2000; Toufican ruins; labyrinth; drive (also in the sense of Trieb).

This project proposes possible reconciliations between the task of the archaeologist and that of the poet, between modern images and ancient texts.

The earth is no longer mere land: it is the sociopolitical terrain of our species.

This installation includes a video that documents a collaborative performance by Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton at DESTE Foundation Project Space on the island of Hydra, Greece, in 2009, as well as elements that were first exhibited there.

Bronze Revirado shows festive bell ringing in a church tower in São João del Rey, Minas Gerais.

We propose a temporary pavilion for Calligraphy Square in Sharjah, consisting of transparent bubbles.

'In this video, I constantly roll in and out of an old Dagestani carpet, known as a kilim. The carpet’s design symbolises the Garden of Eden.'
Taus Makhacheva

Colourful lines and dots are then added, using ink and oil, which are coded as in a map’s legend to indicate important information that is hidden.

Chalks and Pins and Charcoal make up a sort of tapestry made from multicoloured pieces of chalk and black charcoal lined up in horizontal and diagonal rows.

The process of writing Chinese ideograms, which originated over two thousand years ago, is governed by strict rules.

'Domes appear as an element in architecture throughout the world.'
Zeinab Alhashemi

Each performer is presented in a reenactment of his or her normal performance situation, and an abstract cacophony is generated from their combined music.

City Language III is the third part of a video trilogy conceived as an experimental sound portrait of Istanbul.

A fog sculpture in a courtyard, composition invites bright sunlight to mingle in a mystical, cloudlike space.

The video and the book tell three stories inspired by his daily life, describing alleged conspiracies and attempting to draw in the viewer.

In a long corridor-like room at Bait Al Serkal, another Heritage Area building, seven doors opening onto the veranda have been replaced with coloured screens.

Conversion is an installation that plays with this natural source of light by covering the courtyard with a metal structure made up of pivoting panels of coloured filters.

The recorded percussive sounds were performed by hand, reflecting the artist’s desire to connect 'audio ornamentation' with handmade visual ornamentation

De-miners 1 is part of the series Found Objects, which depicts different cluster munitions that were collected after the 2006 war on Lebanon, as well as the crews that gathered them.

Performances often exist only in closed institutional spaces, never reaching a secondary audience.

Desert of Pharan documents the rapid development of Islam’s holiest city, takes its title from the ancient name of the region surrounding Makkah (Mecca).

Dictums 10:120 is a multi-part project that involves the composition and performance of a qawwali song.

Dilbar is a portrait of a city builder, one of a million Bangladeshi workers currently living in the United Arab Emirates.

If a line of kids leaves Europe and heads towards Morocco, and a line of kids leaves Africa and heads towards Spain, will the two lines meet in the chimera of the horizon?

I collect found objects and use them as the basis for my installations and drawings.
Fumito Urabe

Enclosed revisits the extraordinary history of a monument located in the heart of Algiers.

The long-term project , YOVO! YOVO!’s first collective work, draws on the theorist Timothy Mitchell’s concept of 'enframing'.

This piece came to me when I was in the Sharjah desert. I saw a mirage that I couldn’t understand.

In contrast to the large scale of Shadow Sites I and II, Excavators is shown on a tiny monitor and focuses on a group of industrious ants working in the sand.

Will new flowers blossom from the existing rotten system? Can we remain independent, capable of adding value? If not, then what shall we do?

Mohamed Abdelkarim engages with notions of authorship and representation, camouflage and concealment, exchange and play.

Falling Rope was initially inspired by a 1907 photograph by Herbert Ponting of Shiraito (literally, 'falling string') Waterfall, in Fujinomiya, with Mount Fuji in the background.

Familie Tezcan is a video portrait of a German family of Turkish origin breakdancing and singing in four different languages – Turkish, Arabic, German and English

A wooden construction built by a few people in coastal Gujarat can pass through or touch a remarkable number of ideologies, winds, pirates and navies, sanctions and treasures, fears and wants, and forms of boredom and play.

Tsai continues her exploration of the relationship between nature and spirituality through an examination of the Tao tribe from the Lanyu Island of Taiwan.

As part of Zhang’s considerations on paint, the colour black has become an important presence in his work.

The title of this project is Heritages; the plural form underlines the different layers present, since the project materialises a bridge between tradition and modernity in the context of the United Arab Emirates today.

Images migrate, often without much luggage.

'How to Read an Image Past a Surpassing Disaster?, is composed of six images: five photographs as well as a printout (that includes two photos) of the Ottoman translation of the first paragraph of my book The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster.'
-Jalal Toufic

I Am My Tool – Wall Street consists of six large oil paintings that powerfully visualise scenes of a tumultuous confrontation.

The Wagah border crossing between India and Pakistan is the site of a daily military ceremony known as the 'lowering of the flags'.

When I first came across a picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, I noticed how much it resembles the Islamic breaking of the fast – known as Iftar in Arabic – during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

This project involves creating two spaces that are elemental and sensorial, based on the needs of everyday life.

In the Courtyard is composed from video and sound recorded (by Cevdet Erek and Muhittin Bilginer) at this site.

Infinite Rock is a disturbing caesura in the absolute brightness of the Arabian urban fabric: a dark volume that absorbs all light, creating a visual current that draws in the visitor.

One person at a time enters a small room containing a chair and a television set.

Combining site-specific installation, photography and performance, Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok is situated in the courtyard and two rooms of Bait Khalid Ibrahim, a historical site in Sharjah's Heritage Area.

The racial politics of colonialism has left the Wolof people of Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania with many terms to describe the variations between white and black, while the names of many other colours are French loan words.

An empty area is covered in an instant by currents of water that come from every side, suggesting the beginning of a flood.

This painting is from the series Groundless, 2011―2012, in which buoys, ears and shoes float above a dark mauve or black background.

In a single take, the camera records a car racing across the Pan-American Highway in the southern Peruvian desert, the location of the Nazca Lines, ancient geoglyphs dating from 300 bc–900 ad.

Low-rider cars, which originated during the late 1940s in Mexican-American communities, have a hydraulic suspension system that allows them to change height, appearing to jump or dance.

This study of the secondhand-clothing market in Lahore reveals the transformation that occurs when a garment moves from one body to another, and from one culture to another, in a process of memory and change.

Mabini art is a genre of conservative Filipino landscape painting associated with lowbrow commercial galleries that cater to the tourist market.

This mosaic work is an abstraction of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a world map belonging to a pre-scientific, Christian cartographic tradition that placed Jerusalem at the centre.

This collection of games includes new games as well as variations on existing ones. For every game, there is a poster – a visual poem that also works as a score/instruction/recipe for how to play.

From the series Merely a Mistake II, 2009—2013

Monovacation consists of three parts: the original tourism commercials that were used as data, presented in grid form; a digital print of the network map of tags created by content analysis of each clip; and a generic video of a vacation as edited via network analysis.

Myths and Legends Room – The Mural looks at the genre of large-scale wall painting as commemorative propaganda art, making reference to murals and dioramas that celebrate the history of modern Egypt.

Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement provides a view into the communal gatherings of the Greenacre Order in western Sydney, Australia.

This work uses a questionnaire and mapping software to capture the relationships between expatriates’ subjective encounters with neoliberalism in the UAE and in their home countries.

In Just’s earliest video, made when he was a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, an older man begins dancing in a public square, oblivious to the laughing gawkers who pass by.

This project is inspired by traditional arish architecture – an ancient method of construction using dried palm leaves – and the oasis, an anomaly in the desert where water is found and vegetation carefully cultivated.

Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain.

One Hundred Thousand Solitudes examines images that have emerged from the Arab revolutions and from different Occupy movements throughout the world.

Fascinated by this unusual take on electronic music, Carlos Amorales and musician Julian Léde commissioned Orellana to create his own version of the score for a segment of Walt Disney’s classic animated film Fantasia (1940).

The camera follows a hand carefully carrying a glass filled with ink through the streets of Tunis.

Focusing on Sharjah’s location on the Strait of Hormuz, and the area’s historical power tensions, this animated video explores ideas of control and conflict.

Fragments of hand-woven and industrially produced carpets from around the world.

The music in Peace is Not What You Believe is intended to create sensory and spatial effects that, in turn, may lead to the creative resurgence of memory and new imaginings.

These two videos show scenes of empty schoolyards and young people enjoying themselves in a river, within a strict, still frame.

'Portrait of Avar asks if one is born with a certain identity, or if we can choose how to identify ourselves.'
Taus Makhacheva

The Postage Stamp series, 2011–2013, projects a vision of a free and independent Palestinian homeland.

Ammar Al Attar surveys prayer rooms across the United Arab Emirates.

It is so real
A remote and intimate world

Random Rolling Cylinder is an installation consisting of a cylindrical corridor with a walkway that leads through its central axis.

Gabriel Orozco explores the creative associations between overlooked objects in today's world, deliberately blurring the boundaries separating artwork and everyday environment.

In this video, Sarah Abu Abdallah is seen painting the shell of a wrecked car with light pink paint, a gesture of defiance against Saudi Arabia’s prohibition on women drivers, which makes mobility the exclusive privilege of men.

A film crew disappears in Sharjah while scouting locations for a film based on Ghassan Kanafani’s 1963 novel, Men in the Sun.

Session is a video triptych shot in Sharjah’s urban areas and desert.

Shadow Sites I and its ‘sister’ Shadow Sites II are both films that adopt the vantage point of aerial reconnaissance missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the ground surveyed.

Shadow Sites II and its ‘sister’ Shadow Sites I are both films that adopt the vantage point of aerial reconnaissance missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the ground surveyed.

I invite the Biennial audience onto an abra, a traditional boat that travels across Sharjah Creek.

The installation Silence Spins is an infinite aural tearoom, seemingly without walls. This is accomplished by building walls that do not reflect sound – or at least, do so at a barely perceptible level.

Shot in downtown Detroit, Sirens of Chrome follows four women in a car as they drive through deserted city streets.

The head of the Centre of Gulf Studies advised that questions regarding 'Mascalat' have been raised previously, but unfortunately no information or resources have been compiled or published regarding this topic aside from what you have mentioned.

Snapshot is a collective reconstruction of news stories in the United Arab Emirates over the last four decades.

A library of 100 books written anonymously or under pseudonyms. Over the years and throughout the world, authors have written under pseudonyms or anonymously.

sound cells : FRIDAYS, the second installation in Magdi Mostafa’s '(sound cells)' series, is an abstract evocation of the artist’s Cairo neighbourhood, Ardellawa, as heard on Fridays – a day of prayer, but also a day of household chores and cleaning.

Studio Pietà (King Kong Komplex) tells the story of Simon Fujiwara’s attempt to restage and photograph a lost picture of his mother held in the arms of a Lebanese boyfriend.

The works employ a Huichol yarn-painting technique, in which coloured wool is applied to wood panels covered with Campeche wax, to create compositions influenced by abstract painting, architecture and design.

Performance with gravel, rocks, epiphytes and inkjet prints on limestone.

Using the flag as a recurrent motif throughout her work, Sara Rahbar explores ideas of nationalism, ideology and belonging.

Terra Incognita, et cetera is an exercise in collective painting and a spin on territorial marking.

The Bank is an urban currency converter of such personal memories and stories, bringing great profit to Bank Street.

In the photographs, you see the caretaker watching the faded screen as I project my drawings upon it, transforming the space and bringing the cinema back to life.

Not long ago, text and image, the conceptual and the formal, were not two separate and irreconcilable entities: in Byzantine icons, emblem books and allegories, text and image work as one, and are treated as one.

In The Dislocation of Degree Zero, Raqs Media Collective transforms found aerial footage of desert landscapes in the United Arab Emirates into a moving inscription.

This project involves the construction of a symbolic garden using objects found in storage at Sharjah’s Department of Culture and Information.

The Goodness Regime is a creative documentary exploring the image of Norway as a country of peace and benevolence.

These opening lines introduce The Interview, an indirect narration of the real-life story of Dr Abdul Nabi, an Iraqi doctor who came to the United States in 2008.

The Prediction Machine asks questions about Western norms in art, the meaning of Europe today and the persistent division between what’s designated the West and the non-West.

The forest of the Delhi Ridge marks the end of the Aravalli Range, the billion-and-a-half-year-old mountain chain that extends along the western coast of India.

In May 2011, I was commissioned by Bidoun magazine to produce a bilingual street sign in English and Arabic – the type that is commonly seen in Cairo.

The Sovereign Forest attempts to reopen discussion and initiate a creative response to our understanding of crime, politics, human rights and ecology.

Stories are told of an old woman who walked through Tahrir Square during the siege by the Egyptian army.

Exhibition visitors are invited to write something personal on cards hidden inside a custom-made box, unable to see as they write.

The Unfinished Conversation is an exercise in 'spectropoetics', a revisitation of the ghosts that haunt a life.

The three characters featured in this work, Puruto-kun, Natriumko-chan and Monju-kun, are mascots that were created for publicity purposes many years ago by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.

This and many more? explores the conflicts that occurred during the period of colonisation and first resistance in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, and how these conflicts affected the approach to development.

In Darija, a north African dialect, a tkaf is a curse invoked by someone close to you.

In the photographs, you see the caretaker watching the faded screen as I project my drawings upon it, transforming the space and bringing the cinema back to life.

A series of Twenty-three artworks.

Each tapestry depicts a strange mechanical device with squares of twenty-five different images attached by lines to handles along the edges.

Since 2010, Lebanon has entered a new phase. While tensions have erupted in the entire region, the country remains in a state of near stagnation.

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has focused on mapping urban spaces, but in these works he concentrates on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Untitled (Groundworks) is a new multi-channel video work that concentrates on the American landscape.

Vayu-Vata is part of an ongoing series of artworks by Gabriel Lester that transpose theatrical and cinematic language into architecture, installation, music, film collage, performance and photography.

This installation is based on the organic shapes of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, but in place of abstract forms, thirty-five different cymbals are suspended from the ceiling

Wang Jianwei’s work is inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s book of the same name – a quote from the 1999 film The Matrix that echoes Jean Beaudrillard’s influential treatise Simulacra and Simulation.

Tarek Atoui conceived this programme as a sound composition of four interrelated movements that build up and feed back on each other.

Xiangqian’s Museum is a fictional institution founded by the artist, comprising an ongoing collection of works that he has encountered or heard about.

The aim of the journey was to explore these traditional gardens as models for physical movement, duration, flow and rhythm.