Sharjah Biennial 9: Provisions for the Future
and Past of the Coming Days

On red nails, palm trees and other icons is a personal archive of images that came together over the course of a year and a half.

First shown in Sharjah Biennial 7 and now part of the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, Beirut Caoutchouc is one of Rechmaoui’s best known works.

A Monument for the Living is a human-scale replica of the notorious Burj al Murr, a derelict concrete high-rise that towers over downtown Beirut.

God Grows on Trees seeks to speak at once about religion, fear, hope, humanity, love and commoditisation.

Men take off their shoes before entering into a large room to sit close to each other in a circle. Women do the same on the other side of a curtain that separates them from the men.

Translated from Arabic, the phrase reads ‘The wider the vision, the narrower the statement’ and is by the Sufi writer Al Naffari.

FUGERE (A Series of Olympiadic Moments) is an exploration into the strangeness of the realm of professional sport.

With Have a Pleasant Stay! I wanted to create a space for reflection and empathy, a visual and physical metaphor of the concept of suffocation and claustrophobia.

My project for the biennial is broad and in four parts, one of which is a long and narrow footpath from the entrance of the museum to the Persian spice market along the Corniche harbour.

Melissa Chimera created a series of oil paintings of white flowers, displayed in tandem with Ne Jame’s poems which evoke humanity’s connection to the seen and unseen world.

Decoder can be read as an inverted monument to the preferred mythology of a consumer-driven model of market capitalism.

The following is a text in progress, dating back to 1985 and now published in its eighth state; it is the Ars Pictorica of the Airmail Paintings:

The Majlis is a series of photographs documenting different sitting areas regionally.

On my first visit to Sharjah, I came with very little knowledge about the cultural and physical nature of life in this part of the world.

I work on the concept of time mainly by dissecting and analyzing time in relation to movement and the pace at which time moves.