The 17th edition of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual March Meeting takes place during the holy month of Ramadan, a time marked by acts of gathering and the sharing of nourishment, conversation and knowledge. Titled to carry songs, March Meeting 2025 (MM 2025) centres collectivity as a vital force in sustaining and passing on knowledge. It asks what is preserved and what is transmitted through the body, through voice, through the quiet solidarities of the everyday? 

To carry songs is to witness, to refuse to forget. Songs can be a map, a ruttier, a collective prayer, a spell to ward off danger, a synchronising of breath. Songs offer a way of listening together as an act of pedagogy. MM 2025 begins with the poetics of testimony, enabling the legal to expand into the somatic, the archival into the intergenerational. Through tenderness and rage, voices mourn what has been lost while dreaming about what is yet to come. 
 

Sonic commemorations, elegies and Indigenous storytelling map constellations of solidarity, drawing blueprints for restitution and care. Fiction, film and oral histories fracture the notion of the state as a fixed entity, opening space for new imaginaries. Discussions follow histories of economies formed through feudalism and colonialism, alongside movements that have built alternative structures of survival and resistance. How do we build and maintain such networks of persistence?

Each evening of MM 2025 closes with gestures of nourishment—performances, suhoors and discussions—that hold space for collective sustenance.