Sharjah Biennial 16

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

The film depicts an epic journey in which the pair strives to break a Guinness World Record, by pushing a wheelbarrow from Ljubljana to Sharjah.

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah’s paintings and video installations reflect on the painful and frequently suppressed legacies of Sri Lanka’s lengthy civil war.

In the 1970s, especially after “documenta 5” in 1972 curated by Harald Szeemann, large-sized hyperrealistic group-portrait paintings featuring Bohemian hippy scenes had brought an international reputation to Franz Gertsch.

I want to question urban planning through the study of places that escape a fixed definition of a city or of architecture: empty lots, wastelands, buildings before, during and after their demolition; places which, due to forgetfulness or lack of interest, escape a defined design and are open to all kinds of possibilities.

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

Rheim Alkadhi’s engagement in an expansive visual practice revolves around narrative pictures, objects and social interactions.

Firoz Mahmud's Halcyon Tarp is a mixed media work on a grand scale that featured a traditional Bangladeshi pavilion.

Hana Miletić explores conditions of scarcity and indifference through their residue and trace in the built environment.

The newly designed Happy 4 Ever tissue boxes and Best Construction fences can be seen in and around Sharjah over the course of the Biennial.

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

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.

Kahurangiariki Smith’s art addresses the history of colonisation, the reclamation of Indigenous knowledge and the present-day, lived consequences of historical events in New Zealand.

Hanni Kamaly’s multidisciplinary, research-driven practice examines material culture, historiography, collective memory, colonial power structures and the bounds of subjectivity to consider questions of memory and commemoration, embodied narratives, attention and agency.

Pamela Rosenkranz often works with materials developed in the high-tech, scientific and pharmaceutical industries, examining how achievements in modern science and medicine transform an understanding of humanity and alter the relationship between nature and culture.

Multimedia artist Pamela Rosenkranz works with materials developed in the high-tech scientific and pharmaceutical industries to demonstrate her concepts through performance, installation, sculpture and painting.

For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the "eye of the storm".

This series advances an idea of painting as an interactive medium able to channel google searches, social networks and spiritual phenomena.

Philippe Parreno creates singular, multisensory viewer experiences characterised by their unique spatiotemporal dynamics, allowing for open-ended, highly participatory explorations.

Having been born in Shufhat camp and having lived there for over 30 years I have witnessed its transformation since childhood.

Over the past few years, Iman Issa’s work has explored the contemporary relevance of objects, ideas and modes of communication that seemingly belong to another time.

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.

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s multimedia and performance practice investigates power structures and imagines possible alternatives.

Comprised of maps that were broadcast on French television news reports about Turkey, Heure de Paris: ‘The map and the territory’ (2015) is presented as a series of seventeen digital prints.

Umar Rashid, also known as Frohawk Two Feathers, is a multidisciplinary artist and the dedicated historian and
cosmographer of his own fictional universe, the Frenglish Empire (1648–1880).

Maharani Mancanagara unravels the complex cultural and sociopolitical history of her homeland, Indonesia, breathing new life into stories that fall outside the realm of popular documented history.

Flavia Gandolfo’s work investigates how the visual conventions and material cultures of nationalism institutionalise state identities.

Images migrate, often without much luggage.

In my country, Nigeria, many people rely on sachet water (popularly called “pure water”) because of the lack of good drinking water.

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

James Bridle is an artist, writer, publisher and a technologist who uses both online and offline platforms, including software, social media, photography, installation and writing, to examine the effect of technology on culture and the ways in which it reproduces and reshapes political power in our current time. 

The Artist documents the ‘new work’ of local farmers who have been forced to comb through suburban domestic refuse everyday in exchange for meager compensation to supplement their falling agricultural income.

Hatoum’s work is an outstanding example of the interweaving of ethical, political and aesthetic issues, whose beauty lies in the wit, economy, risk-taking and even mischief-making with which these issues are conflated...

Neo Muyanga’s music and compositions draw on a variety of styles and themes, including Renaissance madrigals, operettas and acoustic pop.

Installation in collaboration with Neda Saeedi.

'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

Huguette Caland’s work is notable for its wide-ranging style, material, subject matter and medium, an exploratory that extends to a practice spanning disciplines and geography.

Hajra Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice explores issues including the relationship between surveillance and the networks of power that structure human lives, while also addressing the alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and state violence.

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

Oliver Laric is a multimedia artist who analyses the productive potential of the copy, the bootleg and the remix, examining their roles in the formation of both historic and contemporary image cultures.

Kader Attia’s poetic installations and sculptural assemblages investigate the far-reaching emotional implications of western cultural hegemony and colonial systems of power for non-western subjectivities, focusing particularly on collective trauma and notions of repair.

Mariana Castillo Deball explores the ideologically constructed conditions under which artefacts appear in today’s culture as well as the role that these objects play in the construction of identity, culture and history.

Natalie Ball investigates histories of Native American symbolism in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous iconography to propose alternative definitions of Native life.

Robert MacPherson’s work combines a rigorous conceptual base with observations on ordinary life and people.

Mithu Sen unpacks and interrogates systems of social exchange, modes of self-representation and notions of the taboo through close readings and manipulations of language and the body.

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

In works of formal and conceptual rigour, Torkwase Dyson explores the language of spatial constructs as demarcations of both confinement and expression.

I use drawing to organise knowledge.

Our very first work together was already our last.

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.

Interested in the iconography of the domestic sphere as well as fiber-based production processes, Suchitra Mattai creates work in various mediums that investigates the complex relationships between history, memory and the construction of identity in diasporic communities.

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.

Written in Arabic script this work playfully references the notion of ‘in shallah’ in Arabic culture.

The work of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri engages questions of the human condition amid a world of increasing speed, scale, automation and accumulation by dispossession.

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

With an idiosyncratic sensibility informed by Afrofuturism and inflected by humour, Kambui Olujimi mines the collective psyche as a source of social and political commentary.

One day, I met dressed camels in a desert.

Presenting history as a collection of overlapping fragments, Nusra Latif Qureshi constructs new narratives from complex stereotypes.

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.

Khadija Saye (1992–2017) explored notions of traditional African spirituality and ritual as embodied practices to overcome trauma
and despair.

The Incidental Insurgents (2012–15) is a three-part installation that spatialises a contemporary search for a new political language and imaginary.

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.

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.

As a writer and performance maker, Annie Dorsen’s practice explores the intersection of algorithms and live performance.

Founded a decade ago, Metahaven is a research-driven design studio, whose work spans the fields of art, design, filmmaking, teaching, publishing.

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.

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

The Past, the Present and the Future.

Julie Mehretu’s new body of work offers a more contemplative and pared-down response in the aftermath of that moment as she probes deeper into the visual language of abstraction.

In an Irregular Configuration. Rapid changes: complex, turbulent, unpredictable.

In his practice, Lee Kit works with everyday materials such as fabric or cardboard to address ordinary daily rituals and the uses we give them.

They were different tribes. They did have one thing in common, I heard from his story.

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.

From her earliest works, Jac Leirner has worked with found objects, ready-mades and everyday detritus.

Brenda Fajardo is a painter, printmaker, community organiser and art educator whose practice began to take shape in the midst of the Marcos dictatorship, an era in which critics of the Filipino regime were consigned to detention, torture or disappearance.

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

Jeremy Bailey is a self-proclaimed ‘Famous New Media Artist’—an alter-ego he created after graduating from university—and he is also a podcaster and venture socialist.

Over the course of more than four decades, artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah has pioneered a form of visual expression that is profoundly political in aesthetic, subject and form.

Artist and filmmaker Jon Rafman explores the paradoxes of modernity.

In his sculptures, videos and immersive installations, Jon Rafman explores the paradoxes of post-modernity.

Around 1990, I began to photograph my local surroundings.

The first issue is to try and stay focused on the matters of survival.

The two photomontages Perfumes & Bazaar and Justice for the mother are trompe l'oeils of walls in a living-room covered with wallpaper showing on one side a teeming garden of earthly delights and on the other a jungle.

KA (JCB, JCB) is a powerful and evocative sculpture that brings together two backhoe arms into a form that resembles human arms raised in invocation.

Aleksandra Domanović works with sculpture, video and born-digital content, shedding light on the meaning of images and information shifting according to different contexts and historical weights.

Writer and filmmaker Maya Cozier draws from her experience as a dancer and choreographer to create works that focus on West African and Caribbean history and culture.

Karesansui (2015) includes an engawa, or shaded wooden platform, which designates the ideal viewing point of the garden’s slowly expanding voids and offers a calm space of contemplation.

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

Katchokwe Style poigantly recalls African and intenational events that have shaped African society.

In his sculptures, drawings and videos, Kemang Wa Lehulere often excavates the recent past that has receded from view or resides just below the surface of collective memory.

Exploring Indonesia’s colonial history, Jompet Kuswidananto’s SB14 commission, Keroncong Concordia (2019), examines greed and desire for social control through fragmented memory and residual folk tunes.

My son and I would ride our bicycles to this mountainous area in Khor Fakkan and there we made these six different- sized circles.

Kids, Cats and 1 Dog (2016) is a text work installed on the Gallery 1 rooftop, only legible to passing airplanes, helicopters and drones.

An elder of the Wangkajunga people and respected custodian of its women’s law, Eubena Nampitjin (1921–2013) utilised her knowledge of Aboriginal ceremonies to produce large-scale canvases that reflect the strength of her Aboriginal culture and community.

Gudskul: Contemporary Art Collective and Ecosystem Studies is a public learning space established by three Jakarta-based art collectives: Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa and Serrum.

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.

Jawshing Arthur Liou creates video installations that employ digital technology to transform representation and reality.

Kugelbahn is a site specific work developed in response to the distinctive ramps of the Sharjah Art Museum.

The origins of my work lie in a painting by John Frederick Lewis.

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.

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.

In SB12, Lala Rukh presents five bodies of work from 1993 to 2010 that demonstrate her engagement with the sea and horizon as well as her attendant philosophical preoccupations with time, infinitude and nonexistence.

Lament of the Images is a philosophical essay on representation

Approaching the body as a bearer of collective memory, Mohau Modisakeng’s work invokes historical mechanisms of violence and grapples with the tensions and contradictions of inequality, exploitation, slavery and race.

In the art of Maha Mustafa a tension appears physically between what you might call a "meteorological" and a "geological" perspective.

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.

In this self-choreographed solo performance, Linyekula moves, narrates and sings to original music composed by Obilo drummers and guitarist Flamme Kapaya.

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.

One of Japan’s most innovative contemporary designers and restaurateur, Shinichiro Ogata’s lecture explores the connections between design and sweet making.

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

At this fully functioning bookshop visitors can browse and purchase second-hand science fiction and fantasy books.

Some years ago I received an invitation card in the mail from a gallery in New York (Matthew Marks; it was an invitation to an exhibition by a young artist by the name of Peter Cain.

As an artist and composer, Joe Namy’s practice addresses the encoded expressions of identity, memory and power in forms of sonic organisation.

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

Smita Sharma’s photojournalistic work centres the traumatised and forgotten voices of those subjected to human rights abuses.

Daniele Genadry's work examines how the natural landscape presents ruptures in seeing and how light assumes a material form through surface, matter and subject.

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.

In his work, Michael Joo interrogates science and technology in conversation with the history of art. His works generate a set of questions that examine the ongoing exchange between man and natural history.

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Often through collaborative projects, Elia Nurvista reflects on concepts within food discourse related to globalisation, material extraction, exploitation and exotification.

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.

In her paintings, figurative cut-outs and installations, Lubaina Himid approaches questions of identity through the celebration of Black creativity and political agency.

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.

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

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's technique consists of a distinctive compositional approach informed by light, leading to examinations of colours and shadows that translate into cities and people