Overview
Overview
Sharjah International Biennial 6 will represent 117 artists from 25 countries, as a questioning of the relations that constitute the global sphere of cultural agency. Curators Hoor Al Qasimi (UAE) and Peter Lewis (Goldsmiths College) have worked with a number of other international curators including Britta Schmitz, (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), to select works for the Biennial. The new Expo Centre will host, with the Sharjah Museum of Art, works of installation, video and photography in a survey of contemporary practices, that have looked at the developments in the UAE and Arab world (recent survey “5 / UAE” at Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, and of the work of curators, artists and writers that have come to prominence since “ Documenta XI,” such as artist/theorists Tony Chakar, Jalal Toufic and Bilal Kheibz). The curators have selected works that articulate the multiple, yet general discourses between aesthetics and politics in terms of both a diversification and co-inciding of representations and insurgencies. In the generalised terms of the postmodern / post-colonial conditions that are interrogated, also in view of recent 9/11 consequences, the Biennial aims to address this aesthetic, specifically at an urgent time now. The Biennial is showing the works in dialogical contexts, as emerging between these dangerous slippages.
Opening simultaneoulsy at Sharjah Expo Centre, and at the Museums of Art, on April 8th it will run until 8 May; the event breaks the mould of previous Biennials in representing alternative practices. More attention is given to realising artists’ projects. A retrospective of works by Eduardo Chillida is organised in conjunction to the Biennial at the Museum by Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen. The catalogue comprises 630 pages, in colour with also a short guide. It is written in Arabic and English and has commissioned essays from writers from UAE, Lebanon, Europe, USA and China. Prizes at $50,000. Guest Professor Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths College) joins writer / artists Tony Chakar, Bilal Khbeiz and Jalal Toufic for the symposium on 9 / 10 /11 April “Changing Horizons: New Aesthetic Practice” organised by UAE art critic Talal Moualla.