SAF announces new details of Sharjah Biennial 11

Overview

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE)— Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) announces new artists who will be presenting work at Sharjah Biennial 11 (SB11), March 13–May 13, 2013, in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Last month, it was announced that Yuko Hasegawa has invited over 24 artists to create site-specific works. Among the confirmed new commissions are works by artists and filmmakers including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Saâdane Afif, Tiffany Chung, Yang Fudong, Lucia Koch, Nasir Nasrallah, Ernesto Neto, Wael Shawky,Shahzia Sikander and Ana Torfs. The Biennial will also feature a collaborative work by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Seigen Ono, and Shiro Takatani.

Hasegawa has now announced that the following artists will also be included in the Biennial: Ravi Agarwal, Nevin Aladag, Francis Alÿs, Jananne Al-Ani, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton, Luz Maria Bedoya, David Claerbout, Olafur Eliasson, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Shilpa Gupta, Yuichi Inoue, Lamia Joreige, Jesper Just, Amar Kanwar, Kan Xuan, Pablo Lobato, Basir Mahmood, Cinthia Marcelle, Taus Makhacheva, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Gabriel Orozco, Khaled Sabsabi, Pascale Marthine Tayou, and Fumito Urabe. A performance by Japanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda has also been confirmed and will take place in April, as part of an ongoing programme of performances that will be presented throughout SB11.

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen will create a multi-site urban project. The OASIS project links SB11 Biennial venues and the North-East and South-West parts of Sharjah's historic centre which is divided by Bank street, a wide thoroughfare dating from the 1970s. The four OASIS gardens will have varying degrees of public accessibility,each creating a dialogue with specific urban contexts and their users.

Interventions will also include works by Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA; Studio Mumbai - Bijoy Jain; and SUPERFLEX, Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Nielsen.

Film Programme

A film programme curated by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul will feature programming by leading figures in the film industry, including Steve Anker, Dean of the School of Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles; Khavn De La Cruz, Poet, Pianist, Filmmaker, Mondomanila, the Philippines; Ali Jaafar, Executive Director, Independent Film Division, Quinta Communications, London; Mehelli Modi, Founder of Second Run DVD, London; Alcino Leite Neto, Editor, Sao Paulo; JeanPierre Rehm, Theorist, Festival director, FIDMarseille, Paris; Tilda Swinton, Scotland; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Film Director/ Producer, Chiang Mai, Thailand. The programme will include evening screenings in an outdoor courtyard cinema in the new SAF spaces.

Sharjah Biennial Opening Week Programme & March Meeting Dates

The Sharjah Biennial Opening Week Programme will begin with the professional opening on March 13, 2013, followed by the evening Opening Gala Dinner and Biennial Awards ceremony. A full schedule of events March 13–17 will include performances, films, lectures, and the annual March Meeting, a three-day symposium featuring presentations by artists, art professionals, and institutions on the production and dissemination of art in the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region and internationally. March Meeting 2013 will invite speakers to participate in a series of thematic sessions and moderated panel discussions to reflect on and contextualise the concepts addressed by the theme proposed for SB11.

March Meeting 2013 Open Call

March Meeting 2013 Open Call welcomes proposals for thematically relevant presentations grounded in applicants’ areas of expertise or experience that resonate with this year’s biennial concept. Selected Open Call applicants will be invited to present on March 17, join other March Meeting events from March 14–17, as well as attend the SB11 opening on March 13.

To be considered as a candidate for the Open Call, applicants may complete and submit the form available at http://www.sharjahart.org/march-meeting/march-meeting-2013/open-call-for-applications to marchmeeting@sharjahart.org by December 30,2012.

Sharjah Art Foundation New Art Spaces

The opening of Sharjah Biennial 11 will mark the inauguration of Sharjah Art Foundation’s five new multi-functional art spaces which have been in development since 2009. With approximately 20,000 square feet of interior space, connected by open-air courtyards and rooftop terraces, these new spaces will provide venues for the Sharjah Art Foundation’s growing activities and the increasing needs of its community.

The new buildings are located in the Sharjah Heritage Area, which is characterised by clusters of courtyard buildings with windowless, peripheral walls that form narrow alleys. Many of the existent buildings in these areas are former traditional Emirati family homes, which have been preserved or restored over the past 50 years. The new SAF art spaces will follow this typology, while re-introducing lost historic details such as the use of rooftops as social and communal spaces with bridges connecting one to another.

Sharjah Biennial 11 Curatorial Concept

Inspired by the courtyard in Islamic architecture, Sharjah Biennial 11 curator Yuko Hasegawa proposes a new cultural cartography that reconsiders the relationships between the Arab world, Asia, the Far East, through North Africa to Latin America. Hasegawa is looking at artworks and practices that resonate with strands of the Sharjah Biennial 11 theme: complexity and diversity of cultures and societies; spatial and political relations; notions of new forms of contact, dialogue, and exchange; and production through art and architectural practices of new ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling.

Hasegawa was inspired by the courtyard in Islamic architecture—in particular the historical courtyards of Sharjah—where elements of both public and private life intertwine, and where the objective political world and the introspective subjective space intersect and cross over. What sorts of encounters and exchanges do they make possible? What are the ambiguities of such open-closed spaces, and their potentials?

The courtyard is also seen as a plane of experience and experimentation—an arena for learning and critical thinking of a discursive and embodied kind. It marks a generative space for the production of new awareness and knowledge. Within the network of intensifying international and globalising links, the courtyard as an experiential and experimental space comes to mirror something of Sharjah as a vital zone of creativity, transmission, and transformation.

About the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF):

Sharjah Art Foundation brings a broad range of contemporary art and cultural programmes to the communities of Sharjah, the UAE and the region. Since 2009, SAF has built on the history of cultural collaboration and exchange that began with the first Sharjah Biennial in 1993.

For more information on Sharjah Art Foundation and its programmes, please visit www.sharjahart.org.

Professional registration for SB11 is available at register@sharjahart.org.

MEDIA CONTACTS:
FITZ & CO, New York
Meg Blackburn
Tel: +1 212-627-1455 x 225
E: meg@fitzandco.com

Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates
Alyazeyah Al Reyaysa
Tel: +971-6-544-4113, ext. 17
E: alyazeyah@sharjahart.org
t +971 6 544 4113 | f +971 6 568 5800 | PO Box 19989 Sharjah, UAE
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