The awardees selected by Sharjah Art Foundation were Sarah Abu Abdallah, Mohamed Fariji, Rula Halawani, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Khaled Kaddal, Basir Mahmood, Amina Menia, Khaled Sabsabi and Mariam Suhail. Grantees also include Haegue Yang / Eric Baudelaire, recognised for a collaborative proposal.
The announcement was made on March 11, at a dinner celebrating the opening of the annual March Meeting and major exhibitions at Sharjah Art Foundation. The dinner, held in Sharjah’s Mleiha desert, followed a site specific performance by Taro Shinoda and Uriel Barthélémi titled Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique.
The 2016 recipients of the Production Programme grants were selected out of over 200 applications by an international jury comprising Hicham Khalidi (Associate Curator, Lafayette Anticipation, Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette, France) and Alia Swastika (Director, Biennale Jogjia 13 and Programme Director, Ark Galerie, Indonesia).
Originally launched as part of the Sharjah Biennial in 2008, the Production Programme has become one of the Foundation’s core initiatives and is announced every two years. The Programme offers artists resources and a platform for experimentation and the production of ambitious new projects. Since Sharjah Art Foundation’s Production Programme launched, over 1,200 submissions have been received, 550 applications considered, and 55 projects selected for production. Previous SAF Production Programme grantees include Bani Abidi, Marwa Arsanios, Elena Artemenko, CAMP, Ahmad Ghossein, Sean Gullette, Jumana Manna, Mario Rizzi, Zineb Sedira, Lindsay Seers and Raed Yassin. Work commissioned for SAF Production Programme include Jumana Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows into Me, presented as part of her solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in London last year; Ahmad Ghossein’s film The Fourth Stage presented at Sharjah Biennial 12; Ali Cherri’s The Digger , which premiered at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen; works by Bani Abidi and CAMP, which premiered at dOCUMENTA (13); and the film Traitors by Sean Gulette, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2013.
The Production Programme grantees were announced at the start of an exciting week of events at Sharjah Art Foundation, including the 9th annual March Meeting, as well as the opening of several exhibitions and related performances and discursive programming.
March Meeting 2016: Education, Engagement, and Participation, which took place March 12 – March 13, brought together over 40 speakers from the UAE and around the world to discuss how institutions, initiatives, curators and artists have increasingly prioritised their relationships with audiences and communities through current thinking around ideas of education, engagement and participation, through a series of keynotes, case studies and panel discussions.
Exhibitions that opened during the MM 2016 week of programmes: