Sharjah Biennial 8
Still Life: Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Change

Humans can never be alike,
Nor can trees .
A man and a tree in this being form An entity with a unique quality!

It is a sign – or a nemesis – of our times that one cannot easily isolate, abstract or purify the qualities from the defects, the lights from the shadows.

Once I found a mouldy old book abandoned on the lower shelves of a political science library.

I am wild about the public domain because we all own it; it is ours.

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.

This garden is situated in one of the old courtyards of the heritage area in Sharjah.

Autoxylopyrocycloboros documents a performance or, perhaps better, an action that took place on, and ultimately in, the waters of Loch Long on the West Coast of Scotland.

A Hanging Garden is a site-specific garden project that is informed by the tension at the far edge of growth and the desert.

SOI is a collective group of artists, designers and architects from Bangkok and Tokyo.

Having trained in sculpture at Chitrakala Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, Ranjani Shettar creates three-dimensional works that explore the confrontation of the urban and the organic, the metaphysical and the mundane.

The work explores the idea of construction and destruction through the use of black and white symbolism to create a work space suggesting the opposition and complementarity between these two contrasts (the black and the white) as well as the degree of the influence of these relationships, whether complementary or opposing, on our lives, futures, environments, and societies.

The title Saphir (French for sapphire) reflects this, evoking not only the pure maritime light typical of Algiers, but also those flickering glimmers on the horizon that symbolise people’s dreams and aspirations.

I never let my self get in the way of a good idea.

Following in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Tomas Saraceno’s installation, sculpture, photography and video work challenge the conventional restrictions on the human habitat, and suggest new ways of perceiving nature.

Several aspects are recurrent in the work of Michael Sailstorfer: the sculptural transformation of matter from one thing into another, the fascination with the laws of physics (and, ultimately, the construction of the universe), and the notion of mobility versus standstill – where the latter also translates into the notion of "home".