While Jorge Tacla was only an adolescent during the 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende, the upheaval left an irrevocable mark on his politics and practice. A third-generation Chilean of Palestinian and Syrian descent, the artist has been working between Santiago and New York since 1981, unravelling the intricate geopolitical causalities binding Latin America, West Asia and the United States.

Of Land and Water: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection brings together selections that offer different perspectives on our association with and relationship to land, water and homeland.

In Absence and in Presence charts the ways in which land can be reimagined, redefined and reclaimed through the work of artists from West Asia, South Asia, Africa and its diaspora. Featuring over 70 selections from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection installed across three galleries of the Aranya Art Center Guangzhou, the exhibition follows some of the unique trajectories of artistic practice and experiments in these regions, as expressed in painting, sculpture, photography and video.

Comprising 165 photographs and archival documents from the collection of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Member of the Federal Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Sharjah, this exhibition serves as a starting point for research into how photography translates and interprets history.