The sixteenth Sharjah Biennial, titled ‘To Carry’, unfolds throughout the Emirate of Sharjah from 6 February to fifteen June, 2025. Spanning 17 venues – together with Al Mureijah Sq., Kalba Ice Manufacturing facility and the Buhais Geology Park – it showcases over 650 works by 200 artists, with greater than 80 new commissions. Curated by an all-female staff – Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep Öz – the biennial invitations reflection on themes of migration, reminiscence and resilience.
Stephanie Comilang, Seek for Life II (2025)
In a biennial usually preoccupied with the previous, Seek for Life II (2025) by Stephanie Comilang feels refreshingly modern. The 2-channel video splices footage of pearl divers and open-air markets with TikTok movies of farmers and influencers promoting these treasured gems on-line. Comilang has a knack for distilling the advanced histories and present-day realities of worldwide commerce and migration into works that – amidst a broader pattern for didactic essay movies – are surprisingly entertaining of their freewheeling strategy to style. The set up’s sculptural components share this playful spirit: one movie is projected onto a ‘display’ made up of 1000’s of pearls, viewable from a multi-level wood pier. There are iPhone clips, too, of the artist’s personal palms adorned with elaborate pearl-studded nail artwork – a glance she was additionally sporting through the biennial’s preview. These, together with the TikTok movies, level to how new applied sciences have reworked a declining historic business right into a thriving international market.
Aziz Hazara, I Love Bagram (2025)
Aziz Hazara’s I Love Bagram (2025) could also be much less visually spectacular than among the different sculptural choices in Sharjah, nevertheless it rewards affected person viewing. Comprising a bunch of flatscreen televisions positioned on giant steel trunks and transport crates, the set up – in addition to the photographic collection ‘MoonSighting’ and ‘Pores and skin Care’ (each 2024) – mirror the Berlin-based, Afghanistan-born artist’s ongoing actions in Bagram Airfield. Constructed by the Soviet Union within the Nineteen Fifties and subsequently an essential hub for US and allied forces through the Warfare in Afghanistan (2001–21), the army airbase was covertly evacuated in July 2021. Since then, Hazara has been documenting the garbage left behind by troopers and – as he instructed me through the biennial opening – covertly sending it again to the US as his ‘current’ to the American folks. Righteous anger underpins the entire mission, however there may be additionally a darkish humour within the artist’s insistence that the US authorities take possession of the mess – each literal and metaphorical – that they left behind in Afghanistan.
Megan Cope, Kinyingarra Poles (2024)
It’s an hour drive from Sharjah Artwork Basis to Buhais Geological Park, nevertheless it’s price enduring one of many Emirate’s most notorious site visitors jams to see Megan Cope’s Kinyingarra Poles (2024). Comprising greater than 150 timber poles wrapped in garlands of oyster shells, this site-specific set up blends seamlessly into the spectacular panorama of the park, which sits on a former seabed surrounded by the rocky mountain vary of Jebel Buhais. The piece references the significance of oyster harvesting for the indigenous Quandamooka folks – who stay round Mulgumpin / Moreton Bay in Australia – and builds on the analysis behind Kinyingarra Guwinyanba (2022–ongoing), a dwelling, generative intertidal sculpture Cope put in in Quandamooka Nation in an try and heal an ecosystem disseminated by colonial-era overfarming. By putting in a brand new model of this work within the once-fertile, now-arid Buhais Park, Cope speaks to ‘deep time’ – the numerous billions of years of geological historical past that preceded us.
Sakiya, Capital Coup (2024)
Within the previous Al Jubail Vegetable Market, Palestinian collective Sakiya has put in ‘Um al Einein’ (Mom of the Eye), an exhibition inside the bigger biennial that references the group’s actions in an occupied West Financial institution village. On the centre of the set up is Capital Coup (2024), which reimagines the US Capitol constructing as a humble henhouse. The press supplies for the work cite Sakiya’s philosophy of ‘ephemeral infrastructure’, which ‘integrates destruction into building and celebrates upkeep as a type of care’. Just a little greater than 4 years on from the US Capitol assault of 6 January 2021, the improvised nature of this wooden and metal mesh construction clearly evokes the fragility of our establishments and the erosion of the US’s ethical authority on the worldwide stage within the wake of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian battle.
Luke Willis Thompson, Whakamoemoeā (2024)
Set in 2040, Whakamoemoeā is a fictional state broadcast asserting that Aotearoa / New Zealand has efficiently transitioned from a liberal democracy to an Indigenous plurinational state. Described by artist Luke Willis Thompson as a bit of ‘political science fiction’, the movie attracts on actual suggestions made within the 2016 Matike Mai Aotearoa report, which was produced in response to the dearth of significant enter the Māori had been allowed to make to the nation’s constitutional processes. It’s a compelling watch, thanks in no small half to broadcaster Oriini Kaipara’s commanding efficiency. Enjoying a consultant of the newly shaped congress, Kaipara – who, in actual life, was the primary particular person with a conventional moko kauae (chin tattoo) to learn the information on a nationwide community – embodies the Māori absolute sovereignty that this new mannequin of governance seeks to attain. ‘This can be a Māori Nation, and we by no means surrendered our standing right here,’ she declares, her eyes huge in a fierce pūkana. ‘The suitable to self-determination is inalienable!’
‘Sharjah Biennial 16: to hold’ is on view at numerous places in Sharjah till 15 June.
Essential picture: Stephanie Comilang, Seek for Life II (element), 2025, set up view. Courtesy: the artist and Sharjah Artwork Basis and TBA21, Madrid; {Photograph}: Danko Stjepanovic
