Sharjah Art Foundation

Sharjah Biennial 16

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
6 Febuary — 15 June 2025

Image:

Sharjah Biennial 16 co-curator and independent curator Zeynep Öz moderating the panel, titled Towards Counter-Hegemonic Infrastructures, with Yazan Khalili, Lara Khaldi (The Question of Funding); Joachim Hamou, Nabila Saidi (Trampoline House); Leah Gordon (Ghetto Biennale) at March Meeting. Sharjah Art Foundation, 2024. Photo: Motaz Mawid

Overview

The urgency to forge new spaces for the articulation and realisation of alternative modes of social relation, art and critical pedagogy has never felt greater. Artists and creative communities are increasingly finding avenues to self-organise, gather, work, imagine and produce as well as to resist marginalisation, xenophobia, displacement and erasure.

This panel looks at organising principles that exist within these infrastructures that render them counter-hegemonic. How do such spaces give a home to inclusive social cultures that transmit hope in times of struggle? And how does the act of renovating and repurposing old structures serve as an act of radical reclamation, broadening accessibility to art and learning that hold promise for social change?

From Palestine and Haiti to Denmark’s refugee and migrant communities, artists and collectives are accelerating encounters that allow for a shared imagining of inclusive, participatory and grassroots possibilities for our world.

Watch the video here