Sharjah Art Foundation announced Aziz Hazara, Pallavi Paul and Pratchaya Phinthong as winners of the Sharjah Biennial Prize during the opening gala dinner of the Biennial’s 16th edition on Thursday, 7 February 2025.

The winners were selected by a distinguished jury comprised of architect and curator Paula Nascimento, co-founder of Beyond Entropy Africa and co-curator of the award-winning Angola Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013); curator Eungie Joo, formerly Curator and Head of Contemporary Art at SFMOMA, Artistic Director at Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil and curator of Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015); and curator Gerardo Mosquera, co-founder of Havana Biennial and co-curator of the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial (2015–2016) and Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021).

Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, the 16th edition of Sharjah 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 constellation of resonances they have gathered.

Sharjah Biennial Prize Winners

In the Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, Aziz Hazara (b. 1992, Wardak, Afghanistan) presents a dynamic yet modest installation that chronicles the afterlife of Bagram. Hazara’s I Love Bagram (ILB) (2025), Bagram Field Notes (2021–ongoing) and other works ruminate on the impact of military intervention through what is left behind—common grooming products, clothing, tools and other everyday goods, creating a radical archive of knowledge and resistance. 

In her contemplative installation comprised of Reckoning (2024), Afterglow (2024), and the film How Love Moves (2023), Pallavi Paul (b. 1987, New Delhi, India) shows us how life exists in death and death in life. Her moving film portrays gravedigger Shamim Khan, who together with his colleagues buried more than 4,000 people who lost their lives due to COVID-19 and the ethno-nationalist violence that followed the Delhi riots in 2020. 

Off the east coast of the United Arab Emirates, divers working with Pratchaya Phinthong (b. 1974, Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand) have installed an underwater steel structure connected to a solar panel. Slabs of coral brick ‘harvested’ from the walls of the heritage area serve as a bed for repopulating coral growth in the Gulf. Together with 10 granite solar panel sculptures placed around Sharjah, his work We are lived by powers we pretend to understand (2024) reflects on art, science and the true meaning of heritage.

The works in the Biennial are presented alongside an extensive programme of activations, performances, music and film in more than 17 venues across the Emirate of Sharjah, including sites in Sharjah City, Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid and Kalba.

Free and open to the public, Sharjah Biennial 16 runs from 6 February to 15 June 2025.

For more information, please visit sharjahart.org.

Sharjah Biennial 16 Patrons:

Mohammed Afkhami
Haleema Al Owais
Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi
Crescent Enterprises LLC
Maysoune Ghobash
Sawsan Al Fahoum Jafar
Al Midfa Investments Group
Olivier Georges Mestelan
Carla Chammas and Judi Roaman
Reem El Roubi
Alain Servais
Maria and Malek Sukkar