Sharjah, the third-largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, is a place for artistic management deeply interested in research, dialogue with other cultures, engaged in talking about the main contemporary topics and hidden stories. From the Middle East to Africa, from the Asian Southeast to Polynesia, the Sharjah Biennial is an opportunity for visitors to learn about not-always-visible cultural contexts and profound and touching human events. Here, art is not just a market but a cultural manifestation – something that starts from the human dimension of intellect and sensitiveness.
To carry, the 16th Sharjah Biennial edition is curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Natasha Ginwala, Megan Tamati-Quennell and Zeynep Öz, who proposed a project involving native communities from Africa, South America, and the Far East, with a look into environmental protection and spiritual heritage. Running until June 15th, 2025, the Biennial features over 300 artworks by almost 190 artists and takes place in various venues in Sharjah City, Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid, Kalba, and some spots throughout Sharjah emirate, including Buhais Geological Park. The Biennial is organised by the Sharjah Art Foundation, an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the Emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community.
Artists are not here to merely promote themselves, they are here because they believe in their work and the power of art to spread messages to the world.
To carry implies a task, a responsibility, and an honour. The Biennial declines this verb as the responsibility to belong to, represent and give voice to communities, individuals, stories and places; but also the duty to be aware of our precarious condition and make the best use of it to interact with other places and people, without having a devastating impact, as was the logic of colonialism or, in our times, mass tourism. Being human beings implies the use of reasoning, which, in turn, entails the responsibility of acting responsibly, with respect and humility towards others. Each of the artworks exhibited in Sharjah demonstrates a long and in-depth work of research behind it, a genuine intellectual will to tell a story, to share it with the visitors. Artists are not here to merely promote themselves, they are here because they believe in their work and the power of art to spread messages to the world. Even if art cannot necessarily solve the problems that still affect our society, it’s important, at least, to make those problems known.
Women’s voices
Female artists are a strong presence in this Biennial, and it’s obvious that the stories behind most of the artworks tell a lot about women’s experiences and conditions. It’s interesting because it shows how women often are seen to care about the community, in terms of material and spiritual well-being. A Thai Paiwan Nation member Aluaiy Kaumakan tells how she held the Paridrayan community together after the village had been heavily impacted by Typhoon Morakot, which forced the population to relocate, leaving behind their traditional homes and social infrastructure. It was vital to maintain the unity of human relationships and linkage with the land and the ancestors that had remained behind in the devastated village. So, Kaumakan organised collective activities, such as weaving workshops that reconnected the displaced women of her community.
This engagement with heritage is reflected in the artist’s practice, which proposes artmaking not merely as the production of objects, but as part of a ritual, as well as a means to communicate with the ancestors. The result was the woven textile Vines in the Mountain (2020), which uses abstract forms and brightly coloured yarn to capture the spirit of togetherness after the devastation and loss of community wrought by the typhoon. An evocative installation that allows to imagine and appreciate the manual labour of the women who took part in it and their feeling of engagement.
Also from Thailand, Womanifesto – a feminist artist exchange and exhibition programme primarily active between 1997 and 2008 – denounces the shortage of representation for artistic communities comprised of and dedicated to women and their daily experiences, in a male-dominated cultural field. Womanifesto organised a platform for multigenerational artists from across Asia and beyond to gather and create collectively. For the project, WeMend (2023 – ongoing), Nitaya Ueareeworkaul and Varsha Nair – two of Womanifesto’s core organisers – join other members in engaging with different communities of women to stitch fabric scraps into a quilted shelter-like structure. Now reproduced across the globe to include communities in India, Switzerland, Thailand, and the UAE, this shelter offers a transnational space for women of diverse backgrounds to share their stories, exchange knowledge and build platforms for solidarity.
The voice of ancestors
The best way to look ahead is to look behind, first, and not forget our roots. The Biennale keeps the the relationship with the ancestors and their significance in mind, opening a door to spiritual heritages of great fascination and scope. An approach that is oftentimes overlooked in European exhibitions. But Sharjah pays exceptional interest in this kind of research, with great quality and conceptuality moving artworks. Ancestor worship survives in many African Oceanian and Southeast Asian cultures, and it’s something that inspires respect. Kenyan artist Morris Foit’s wooden sculptures appear as composite figures drawn from Indigenous logos and collective experience. Alternately silent and choral, they summon songs of the underworld, uniting the cycle of decay and rebirth. Foit seeks voices and emergent forms in locally sourced wood, working with flowering trees such as jacaranda and leleshwa. Symbolising acts of healing and repair, his sculptures bear marks of deep time in natural line, colour, grain, and density, connecting with the plural ecologies inhabiting the skin of the wood. Sculptures like Acrobat, Busy Woman, Culture, Happy Woman and Vulture (2021), each carved from a single log, talk about a universe of communitarian rituals and celebrations, in communion with nature, honouring the ones who came before.
The best way to look ahead is to look behind, first, and not forget our roots. The Biennale keeps the the relationship with the ancestors and their significance in mind, opening a door to spiritual heritages of great fascination and scope.
On the other hand, Kaili Chun, a Kanaka ʻŌiwi Hawaiian sculptor and installation artist, refers in her works to the “ancestral forces that animate the landscape”. Veritas (2012) is a container for stories, memories and emotions, drawing attention to the relationship between earth, sky, and the restless space between them. The work approaches the Latin concept of veritas, which means truth, particularly of a transcendent character, as unstable and subjective. This play between presence and absence carries through the artwork’s shadows, which Chun describes as “the embodiment of our Ancestors” and a trace of “our direct and intimate connection to land and heritage”.
The sea and its communities
The emirate of Sharjah lies between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, a geographical location of unquestionable beauty, where the sea constitutes the main element along with the desert. The sea – with its delicate ecosystem and the social and economic balances that gravitate around it, is a topic of reflection for several artists attending the Biennial. Remaining on the Persian Gulf, Bahraini artist Mariam M. Alnoaimi’s video installation, The Water that Asked for a Fish, examines and contextualises the Gulf region’s historical and contemporary relationships with water bodies, bringing to focus the precarious nature of their continuing role in sustaining human and ecological life. For this work, Alnoaimi people differently involved in the sea and its ecosystem, like fishermen, biologists, ecologists, writers and community members; the ensuing conversations yielded moving insights into local rituals, animistic practices and stories, proposing a conception of water bodies as living, breathing entities. The work offers insights into regional customs such as putting eyeliner on fish, the offertory practice of wrapping its body in a white shroud before returning it to the sea and why palm leaves are set aflame by women with pearl-diver ancestry.
Indonesian artist Restu Ratnaningtyas, in collaboration with artists Ipeh Nur and Dian Suci Rahmawati, and through the installation My Ancestors Were Sailors (2024), uses the sea as a pretext to talk about the history of maritime culture along the northern coast of Java. They focus on a women’s fishing community in Demak, which is now faced with ecological devastation and the threat of poverty. The community, called Puspita Bahari (Flowers of the Sea), goes against social taboos that discourage Indonesian women from working with the sea.
Memory and resistance
Many communities around the world are affected by natural and economic issues, often caused by external powers that come in to exploit the resources with no respect for local people. It happened in the colonial era, and it’s still happening in the neo-colonial era. But there are still some, who fight oppression. With the video installation Like a Flood, suspended between past and present, Adelita Husni-Bey reflects on the importance of preserving resources and supply infrastructures but also recalls the crimes that Italian colonialism committed in Libya between 1911 and 1943, including the destruction of ancient water supply systems. The film goes on to trace the iconography of dams and wells in the popular poetry of the Jebel al Akhdar region and concludes with a reflection on the adaptability of populations to the natural environment, a balance often broken by external powers and interests.
For Anchi Lin, a Taiwanese artist and a member of the Atayal Indigenous people, art offers a space to explore the intricate linkages between Indigenous womanhood, ecological symbiosis, and concerns over climate change. Canoe (2017), an extension of her project To the Shore 2 (2015/2025), is inspired by the Taiwanese saying, “Big waves can’t wash away a stone mortar and pestle”. The artist filmed eight women from different Thai Indigenous nations engaging in the mundane yet crucial act of sweeping, as they think about their communities and the threat of rising water. Interweaving these meditative videos with sand and clay wind instruments, Anchi Lin invites us to dip into an ocean of the sacred feminine and surrender to the ebb and flow of the waves.
Betty Adii makes drawings, paintings and installations that offer sharp yet thoughtful commentaries on the social and political contexts in Papua. Her work for this year’s Sharjah Biennial, A Legacy of Resistance (Are you really listening?) (2024), extends the artist’s ongoing investigation of the impact of food politics on women. Papua currently faces the threat of calamitous deforestation as the government plans to convert forests into agricultural plantations. This move would sever local women from their own organic farming practices, as well as from their ancestral land. In her painting, Betty uses natural pigments sourced from the forest of Papua, combined with barkcloth created by artists from Sentani, to depict how the “invisible hand” of capitalism shapes the everyday life of these women.
Founded on solid conceptual foundations and frayed in the lightness of imaginative speculation and the sweetness of contemplation and nostalgia, Sharjah looks to the Earth and the stars.
From ancestral roots to future horizons
Sharjah Biennial embraces the world through refined artistic and anthropological research, which delves into the Indigenous cultures of the so-called “global South” and offers the public, as a precious gift, elements of knowledge that, although less known in the distracted Western world, are still the backbone of an intangible heritage that is indispensable for preserving the spiritual essence of humanity. This biennial is culture in its purest form, building bridges and opening new paths between people, creating moments of shared knowledge, so that everyone feels the responsibility of carrying it on their shoulders and is well aware of the task of contributing to civil progress.
The Arab world, the Far East, pre-Columbian America (or what remains of it), Polynesian and Maori cultures, and Sub-Saharan Africa, all find points of contact here reaffirming the idea of the shared path in social progress and the transversality of values. Research, poetry, and worship of the earth and ancestors, permeated with music and light, and an emotional and intellectual experience at once. Metaphorically speaking, Founded on solid conceptual foundations and frayed in the lightness of imaginative speculation and the sweetness of contemplation and nostalgia, Sharjah looks to the Earth and the stars.
