March Meeting 2025: to carry songs
Dates: 7–9 March 2025
Timings: 09:00 pm–1:00 am (Ramadan hours)
Location: Al Qasimiyah School, Al Manakh, Sharjah
The 17th edition of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual March Meeting (MM 2025) will take place during the holy month of Ramadan, a time sustained by acts of gathering and the sharing of food, knowledge and connection. Titled to carry songs, this edition of March Meeting focuses on the power of community in preserving 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?
Songs help us remember—they are maps, prayers, protection, and shared breath. Songs carry culture and history as well as memory. They teach us to listen together. MM 2025 explores testimony as poetry, turning archives into shared memory. Each evening of MM 2025 closes with gestures of nourishment: performances, suhoors and conversations that hold space for collective sustenance.
This year’s edition of March Meeting coincides with the Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry (SB16), which launched on 6 February. The biennial features more than 650 works by nearly 200 participants, including more than 200 new commissions. Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, the Biennial convenes under the title to carry, a multivocal and open-ended proposition. Exploring the ever-expanding questions of what to carry and how to carry it, SB16 is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators, as well as the resonances they have gathered.
MM 2025 will offer a range of conversations, performances and musical events, emphasising the importance of collectivity through song, communion, ancestral knowledge, stories and poetry.
The first day of MM 2025 begins with a conversation between artist Hashel Al Lamki and curator Amal Khalaf that explores the intersections of art, collective pedagogies, and cultural memory. Following this, Faris Shomali will join SB16 artists Mohammed Al Hawajri and Dina Mattar to discuss their art practice and the relocation of their studio within the exhibition. The evening closes with houaïda's The Love of Spirits Sounding Worlds – A Devotion, a web of rhythms and vocals that draws upon memories of diasporic kinship, astral reading and ambiguous corporeality. The performance reflects the artist's conception of love as a multitudinous worlding, a form of collective surrender into a state of fluid sound.
The second day opens with a soulful original song and a stripped back transformative sonic experience by musician and sound artist Mara TK. From Aotearoa, Mara TK blends kaupapa Māori, Māori focused music, with multidisciplinary sound artistry. This performance will be followed by Desiring Beings, Dissident Chorus, a conversation between poet-writer and translators Athena Farrokhzad and Meena Kandasamy, moderated by SB16 curator Natasha Ginwala. The panel Legacies of Transformation initiates a dialogue between artist Raven Chacon, Nici Cumpston, director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Charlottesville, USA, and Subash Thebe Limbu, a filmmaker who developed the concept of ‘Adivasi Futurism’. Moderated by SB16 curator Alia Swastika, the lecture and cooking presentation Cooking as Embodied Memory by Suvi Wahyudianto and food activist Dicky Senda will explore the narrative of food as an impetus for social gathering, as well as a manifestation of local wisdom and knowledge. Musician Ata Ratu, the first woman to sing in the Kambera language while playing the jungga, a four-stringed traditional instrument, will close the session with a performance of songs that comment on how modernisation has changed the way humans relate to nature.
The final day of MM 2025 will commence with Roots of Power: Feudal Foundations and Modern Economies, featuring artist Olivia Plender and social anthropologist Celia Plender, who will discuss the topic of transition from feudalism to capitalism, as well as historical and present day political and economic alternatives, moderated by Zeynep Öz. Following this, for the panel Transformative Indigenous Governance, artist Luke Willis Thompson in conversation with SB16 co-curator Megan Tamati-Quennell. Together, they will introduce Willis Thompson’s new moving-image work, Whakamoemoeā (2025), which was filmed in front of the whare rūnanga, a renowned carved meeting house that was the site of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand. The programme continues with Alphabets & Linguistic Traditions, a conversation between artist Dilek Winchester and Ana Iti, both of whose practices are rooted in research in linguistic systems of knowledge, moderated by Zeynep Öz. While Iti’s practice draws upon the printing press and its poetic role in the dissemination of Maori language, Winchester examines the introduction of the Latin alphabet in the Turkish language and its effects on cultural and linguistic traditions.
Coming together to reflect on the dynamic journey of to carry, the five curators of SB16 will each share their curatorial practices and processes, which span diverse methodologies such as residencies, workshops and collaborative productions. The final day concludes with a closing performance by Chaar Yaar – The Faqiri Quartet, featuring Madan Gopal Singh, Deepak Castelino, Pritam Ghosal and Amjad Khan. This offering brings the event to a powerful and resonant close, blending references to Sufi poetry, Punjabi lore and a host of other literary trajectories within a single harmony.
Each day of the MM 2025 will host conversations that celebrate the power of gathering and sustaining one another, and each day will conclude with moments of collective nourishment and musical performances, honouring the holy month of Ramadan.
For more information on March Meeting 2025 and Sharjah Biennial 16, please visit sharjahart.org
April Acts
18–20 April 2025
Across Sharjah Biennial 16 venues
April Acts is a weekend programme activating different aspects of the Biennial through panel discussions, artist talks, participatory workshops, film screenings and live music performances.
The Biennial experience will extend throughout its four-month run with weekly screenings, a variety of workshops for different age groups, and artist conversations, both online and in person.
Biennial Bytes: Season 2
The second season of the official podcast of Sharjah Biennial will launch in the coming weeks, featuring insights and stories about SB16 projects from the curators and participating artists, including Naeem Mohaiemen, Stephanie Comilang, Citra Sasmita, Joe Namy and Ana Iti, among others.
Sharjah Art Foundation is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the Emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. The Foundation advances an experimental and wide-ranging programmatic model that supports the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the distinct culture of the region and encourages a shared understanding of the transformational role of art. The Foundation’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial, featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications.
Established in 2009 to expand programmes beyond the Sharjah Biennial, which launched in 1993, the Foundation is a critical resource for artists and cultural organisations in the Gulf and a conduit for local, regional and international developments in contemporary art. The Foundation’s deep commitment to developing and sustaining the cultural life and heritage of Sharjah is reflected through year-round exhibitions, performances, screenings and educational programmes in the city of Sharjah and across the Emirate, often hosted in historic buildings that have been repurposed as cultural and community centres. A growing collection reflects the Foundation’s support of contemporary artists in the realisation of new work and its recognition of the contributions made by pioneering modern artists from the region and around the world.
Sharjah Art Foundation is a legally independent public body established by Emiri Decree and supported by government funding, grants from national and international nonprofits and cultural organisations, corporate sponsors and individual patrons. Hoor Al Qasimi serves as President and Director. All exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Sharjah is the third largest of the seven United Arab Emirates and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Reflecting the deep commitment to the arts, architectural preservation and cultural education embraced by its ruler, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Sharjah is home to more than 20 museums and has long been known as the cultural hub of the United Arab Emirates. In 1998, it was named UNESCO's 'Arab Capital of Culture' and has been designated the UNESCO ‘World Book Capital’ for the year 2019.
Alyazeyah Al Marri
alyazeyah@sharjahart.org
+971 (0)6 5444113