Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry (SB16), launched on 6 February, unveils more than 650 works by nearly 200 participants, including more than 200 new commissions. Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, the Biennial convenes under the title to carry, a multivocal and open-ended proposition. Exploring the ever-expanding questions of what to carry and how to carry it, SB16 is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered
Words: Lexy Funk
Mahmoud Khaled, Pool of Perspectives–2030, 2025. Photo: Motaz Mawid
To carry sight in light of blindness, to carry voices to overcome deafness. I met Zeynep Öz, one of the five curators of this year’s Sharjah Biennial in Istanbul, three years ago. We both brought Derrida’s Politics of Friendship to our meeting. She subsequently invited me to participate in her Yaz Publications- a set of artists’ books, stories and critiques she edited as she joined fellow curators Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Natasha Ginwala and Megan Tamati-Quennell to curate the biennial based on the disparate meanings of to carry. On February 6th, I carried from New York the anxiety of the current politics, the brashness of militarism, and the rise of right-wing populism. In contrast, the Sharjah Art Foundation’s curator Hoor Al-Quasimi’s opening remarks amongst the museum’s white walls called for plurality of artistic voices, for honoring the dispossessed. This spirit of generosity lent itself to a polyphony of curatorial and artistic voices spread over more than 650 artworks, 200 participants and 200 new commissions in multiple museum venues and converted spaces across Sharjah.
Left: Hugh Hayden, Brier Patch, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, New York,. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic
How can I do justice to this orchestra of works mostly from the global South that made up the narrative of to carry? The curators built their contemporary works against the backdrop of historical art collectives and movements- Womanifesto, a feminist artist exchange in Thailand and historical archives of the Non-alignment Movement from Serbian documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlic, South Asian choreographer Chandraleka and founder of the Cholanmandal Artist Village, artist Viswanadhan. But, more importantly, I suggest we let the deceased Bahrainian artist Nasser Al Yousif (whose linographs were completely after he went blind) listen to the sounds of the Biennial as they carry their voices with the works. Thus, Nasser Al Yousif’s rounded fishermen and villagers call out to Stephanie Comilang’s video In Search for Life II projected images of contemporary pearl production onto a twenty-foot-high beaded wall. Liu Chung’s sci-fi video Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphone 1 queries our present.
Most impactfully, Navajo artist and composer Raven Chanon gives voice to the Bedouin community from the failed housing project of Al Maden. Speakers relay voices within sand buried houses, echoing across uninhabited structures the words:
Vinegar has received the ovation.
Nature has its’ swag
All painful wounds do heal.
You have the spirit of wounds.
Anxiety is a cure.
You have a tent spirit.
Having a coffee.[1]
This lament of nature is echoed in the soundscape curation at The Farm, a dusty abandoned palm tree farm whose artists took inspiration from Zeynep Öz’s publication Shedding (with artist and writer Fatma Belkıs). Of note is Hauptmeier/Recher’s metal sticks from which Palms of Speculative Memory emanates and Sand Chamoun’s hole which echoes sounds of regeneration.
Left: Hauptmeier-Recker, Palms of Speculative Memory
Right: Sandy Chamoun, The Hole
In another location, the school, literal choirs in Susanne Lacy’s historical piece The Circle and the Square (2015-2017) overlap Sufi music with Shape Note choral music. This ode to the departed textile industry and welcoming of new migrant populations overlap in shifting harmonies. Also, in the school in Dilek Winchester’s Choreographies of the Unreal- following speech to text with a projection of a tap dancers staccato notes over a horizontally moving calligraphic text. The artist Bint Mbarek’s sculptural and sound installation What’s Left vibrates a tank of water with plastic army men and falling marbles when leftist songs blast from speakers. The effect is as jarring as Winchester’s is staccato.
Suzanne Lacy, The Circle and The Square, 2015–2017. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin
If these myriads of voices fail to exult, or to regenerate, then the works in the temporary location of a disused covered vegetable market carry the refuse of abandoned Soviet and US military bases in Afghanistan. Artist Aziz Hazara’s sculptural and video installation I Love Bagram chronicles the circulatory leakage of electronic waste in the ruins of invading empires. Three diffuse works further engage technology and history. In Vladen Joler’s computer animation with Kate Crawford- New Extractivism: An Assemblage of Concepts and Allegories- a figure bounces on a conical sphere while an ominous, almost robotic voice recounting the allegory of Plato’s cave and our participation as subjects in surveillance capital. Mahmoud Khaled’s installation Pool of Perspectives 2030 features monolithic civic buildings designed in CGI but painted on ceramic tiles. The exaggerated perspective of a receding city scene echoes the history of Portuguese colonial past in Sharjah. Lastly, Sarah Abu Abdallah’s more whimsical and luscious blue scroll in her painting You Ask, We Answer winds around a museum hall with text bubbles forming rhizomatic memories. Jolts of the artist’s world and screened interactions fragment a personal narrative, both playful and inviting.
As I return to New York and the accompanying headlines of further distrust and confusion, the polyphonous sites of To Carry ricochet forward. Will this collection of artists have political efficacy? This is the wrong question. Cecile Evan’s dystopic sculpture provides a fantastical backdrop. Maquettes of the United Nations assembly are split into four islands; miniature ascending rows of seats remain empty atop an abandoned cityscape. In her piece Ad Hoc Order (2025), Evans proposes an ecological disaster that has erased all personal data. The CIA’s global trend forecast of ’97 has simply been woven into a tapestry.
And my memory of the Sharjah Biennial? I sat next to dinner with the Bahraini artist, Mariam M. Alnoaimi. I had seen her thoughtful video The Water that Asked for a Fish of palm leaves set aflame and fish marked with eyeliner. She described her walking artwork. At low-tide, she takes art viewers on pathways to fishermen who discuss their fishing practices and show their tools. I close my eyes and listen for the birds of flight to carry me elsewhere.
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