SB16 Opening programme: 6–9 February 2025
Sharjah City, Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid, Kalba, Al Madam
and other locations across the Emirate of Sharjah
March Meeting: 7–9 March 2025
Al Qasimiyah School, Al Manakh, Sharjah
April Acts: 18–20 April 2025
Across Biennial venues
to carry a home
to carry a history
to carry a trade
to carry a wound
to carry equatorial heat
to carry resistance
to carry a library of redacted documents
to carry rupture
to carry Te Pō [the beginnings]
to carry change
to carry songs
to carry on
to carry land
to carry the language of the inner soul
to carry new formations
to carry the embrace of a river current
to carry sisterhood and communal connection
to carry the rays of a morning without fear
The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.
The Biennial theme, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?
Thus, ‘to carry’ proposes the Biennial as a collective wayfinding, a modality of sense-making and insistent looking—back, inwards and across—instead of a ‘turning away’ amidst tides of annihilation and tyranny. Sharjah Biennial 16 curatorial projects reflect on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities. As community doulas would hold space for others during moments of transition, the projects collectively form a threshold space for experiments and collaborations, in which we compose divergent stories, understand failures and dark moments, and hold room for tenderness and rage.
As carriers of different processes and offerings, the curators have cultivated their projects together and apart, allowing room for listening, mutual support and the sharing of resources. Diverse curatorial methodologies—from residencies, workshops and collective production to writing, sonic experiences and expanded publications—are constantly present in the milieu of the Biennial, encouraging critical conversations. Sometimes, projects by different curators sit together in one venue to form a wild polyphony; at other times, they occupy an entire space to recite a story. Together, they form an evolving collection of narratives told from multiple perspectives, geographies and languages.
Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, Sharjah Biennial 16 features works by more than 140 participants, including over 80 new commissions, which will be presented across the Emirate of Sharjah.
