The Return of Sharjah Biennial
ALO WALA (2015) by Hassan Hajjaj from the My Rockstars Series. COURTESY OF ALO WALA AND HASSAN HAJJAJ
After a three-year hiatus, Sharjah Biennial will return next March. It is a landmark moment also for the event, as SB15 will realise the dreams of its curator, who died in 2019. Here, Anna Seaman gives a short preview ahead of the 2023 event.
The influential Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor was known around the world for thoughtful exhibitions that displaced Western art from its central position and retrained the global focus upon art from the Global South. For the Sharjah Biennial’s 15th edition, set to open on February 7, Enwezor proposed commissioning 30 works as a way to meaningfully activate this critical platform through the development of new work. Titled Thinking Historically in the Present, it will feature works by more than 150 artists from over 70 countries, presented at 16 venues across the emirate. They will build on Enwezor’s ideas about the postcolonial world and offer a critical reimagination of history as well as the present.
Enwezor became involved in the curatorial process for Sharjah’s biennial in 2018, when Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, president of Sharjah Art Foundation and director of the biennial, visited the Dakar Biennale. There, she met Salah Hassan, a historian and curator whose work traverses many institutions in the US and the recently founded Africa Institute in Sharjah, he helped her approach Enwezor.
Enwezor already held a special place in Al Qasimi’s heart. His 2002 edition of Documenta—an important exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany—is considered a turning point in recent contemporary art history. It was a coming-of-age moment for Al Qasimi, who left with plans to turn Sharjah’s biennial on its head.
Although he was already unwell at that time, he relished the opportunity to curate SB15. However, it became clear that he would not see the journey to the end. He died of cancer in March 2019. To ensure the integrity of Enwezor’s vision, Al Qasimi formed the SB15 Working Group: Salah Hassan; independent curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh; Ute Meta Bauer, a professor and founding director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Chika Okeke-Agulu, a professor and art historian at Princeton University; and Octavio Zaya, an independent curator, art writer and executive director of the Cuban Art Foundation. In addition, an advisory committee includes architect Sir David Adjaye and Christine Tohmé, a curator and the director of Ashkal Alwan, an artists’ association in Beirut.
In line with Enwezor’s belief in Sharjah Biennial’s disruptive power, 30 artists have been invited to embark on major commissions “that explore histories that continue to shape our present”. The number marks too the biennial’s 30-year anniversary. They include John Akomfrah, a widely respected British-Ghanaian artist and filmmaker, whose works investigate memory, post-colonialism, temporality, and aesthetics and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas; Hassan Hajjaj, a Moroccan contemporary artist who fuses portrait photographs with pop-culture imagery to question the position of the modern Arab; and Hajra Waheed, a Montreal-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice ranges from painting and drawing to video, sound, sculpture, and installation. Other notables are Kader Attia, a French-Algerian artist who works across diverse media, exploring the effects of Western cultural hegemony and colonialism, and Almagul Menlibayeva from Kazakhstan, whose photography addresses social and ecological issues across Central Asia.
The works are as diverse in geography as they are in theme and context but come together to straddle the gap between history and future, east and west, and individual and society.—AS
Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present,
February 7 to June 11, 2023.