Launched on 7 March 2019, the 14th edition of Sharjah Biennial will soon come to a close on 10 June. Titled “Leaving the Echo Chamber”, SB14 presents three distinct exhibitions curated by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons that bring together a diverse range of experiences and contemporary artworks by over 80 artists from around the world, including major new commissions, large-scale public installations, performances and films. The artists in SB14 create “a series of provocations about how one might renegotiate the shape, form and function of the ‘echo chamber’ of contemporary life”.
The Biennial becomes a platform for exploring the possibilities and purposes of producing art today, at a time when there is monopoly of news and mass media, with resulting biased information as well as fake news, history is increasingly ‘fictionalised’, society is often displaced, and borders and beliefs are dictated and controlled by cultural, social and political systems. Therefore, the curators and artists bring together a series of diverse ideas that examine, explore, counter and offer alternatives to the echo chamber that contemporary life has created around us. The concepts thus presented, whether through personal, collective, local or global (hi)stories, all resonate within a universal narrative wherein we as individuals as well as members of society face our everyday challenges.
Zoe Butt, 2018. Image courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation. Omar Kholeif. Photo: Eric T. White. Claire Tancons. Photo: Nicola Bustreo.
In a press release for SB14, Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, comments on the 2019 edition:
Contemporary life is dominated by competing information and fluctuating histories—a reality that raises important questions about the trajectory of contemporary art as well as the conditions in which it is made. Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons bring incredibly different perspectives to these questions and together represent the complexity of challenges faced by today’s artists and society as a whole. The aim of Sharjah Biennial 14 is to deepen the context of these questions through thought-provoking and often experiential works of art, and this year’s March Meeting will complement and provide opportunities to explore these works and the Biennial theme more deeply.’
Journey Beyond the Arrow
The section titled “Journey Beyond the Arrow” is curated by Zoe Butt, currently Artistic Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and a member of the Asian Art Council for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition features the work of 28 artists hailing from Afghanistan, Argentina, China, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, among other countries. The “Journey” offers a “deeper context” to explore humanity’s movement and displacement and the “tools” that have helped or hindered its survival. Here, artists of different generations explore such tools – both physical and psychological – and how they are used and abused, and represented under various circumstances, as a consequence of colonial exploitation, social and religious conflict or ideological extremism. In the curatorial overview, Butt explains:
With their own distinctive approaches, the artists assembled here investigate the historical context of the ‘bow’, which reveals the ‘arrow’ of humanity’s echo—an echo of the diversity of all our activity in relation to language, memory, belief, ritual, and cultural and social practice. The artists’ imaginative retelling of our planet opens us up to what has been overlooked or lost in the echo chamber—a chamber that is economically intertwined yet governmentally divided, often culturally stymied by tradition and insidiously controlled by authoritarianism, a chamber that betrays us when we blindly participate in its algorithmic realm, which pursues quantity instead of meaning. Journey Beyond the Arrow seeks to illuminate the necessity of exchange and diversity across the globe and throughout human history.
In his ongoing project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012–present), Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen poses a fundamental question: What is Southeast Asia? The Dictionary, through one entry for each letter of the English alphabet, explores and re-imagines the region that is unified by a term, but is utterly diverse by language, religion or political structures. The entry titled R (Resonance) is a new commission for SAF presented at SB14, and is a VR installation examining the gong in Southeast Asia, an instrument found ubiquitously in the region, used in the ritual and sacred spheres, also associated with the concept of empire, the elite and social stratification since the Southeast Asian Bronze Age. In his virtual world, Ho explores the metamorphic quality of molten bronze, the links between the instrument and the social, political and environmental specifities of the region, as well as the process of connecting through vibrations – resonance – rather than logic – reason. Ho finally follows a human trajectory of interconnected spaces, while recalling the systemic and colonial mechanisations of power that have characterised this part of the world.
Jompet Kuswidananto’s SB14 commission Keroncong Concordia explores the colonial history of his native Indonesia, and particularly the greed and desire for social control and the legacy of racial violence in Indonesia. The artist references the Societeit Concordia, the Bandung social club that popularised keroncong, a type of music developed by Indo-Europeans, but rooted in Portuguese fado (brought to Indonesia by 17th-century slaves). Considered lower class during the colonial era, keroncong eventually came to be regarded as an outstanding Dutch contribution to culture. Societeit Concordia was segregated by race and class, dividing Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese and mixed communities. These prejudicial practices were at the root of continued racial-based violence in Indonesian history, even after the country’s independence from the Dutch in 1945.
The theme of intercolonial communities is also examined by Vietnam-based Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn in his newly commissioned four-channel video installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming. The artist draws from French colonial history in then-Indochina to focus on Senegalese-Vietnamese communities, descending from the Senegalese soldiers, or tirailleurs, who were among the forces deployed to Indochina to combat the Vietnamese uprising against French rule. During the conflict and after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of Vietnamese women and their children migrated to West Africa with Senegalese husbands. Other soldiers left with only their children, while others took mixed or Vietnamese children back to Senegal and raised them as their own there. First searching for stories of solidarity between Senegalese and Vietnamese combatants, Nguyễn later found only the legacies of colonial prejudice across colour, class and faith. The artist worked with Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants to imagine scenarios in order to reconnect with their past. Their voices “embody a historical conscience that challenges understandings of decolonising societies”.
Phan Thảo Nguyên also examines Vietnam’s historical past, focusing on the countryside as a dreamscape in which cultural and political histories play out. Her SB14 commission entitled Mute Grain received a special mention by the Sharjah Biennial Prize Jury. The mixed media installation, encompassing painting and video, examines the 1945 famine which took place in the Red River Delta of French Indochina under Japanese occupation (1940–1945). The dramatic event, which has received little attention, saw over two million people dying of starvation in this area of northern Vietman, partly caused by Japanese demands to grow jute over rice to support their war economy. The story is told from the perspective of two adolescents, Tám, a young woman who becomes a hungry ghost stuck between this life and the next, and Ba, who is anxiously in search for his sister. Nguyên explores the tension between official and unofficial history by skilfylly weaving narrative elements from a diverse range of sources. To Hoai’s prose account of the famine and historian Van Tao’s records of oral histories from Hanoi’s Revolutionary Museum merge with the mystical and the supernatural from Vietnamese folk tales, and lyrical chronicles recalling Japanese post-war writer Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
Making New Time
The SB14 exhibition “Making New Time” is curated by Omar Kholeif, a writer, curator, editor and broadcaster based in London. He has curated the V-A-C Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, and is currently Senior Visiting Curator at HOME, Manchester, Curator for Abu Dhabi Art and guest curator for Manchester International Festival. As one of the three “provocations” of SB14, “Making New Time” offers ways to reimagine material culture, in an age of constant mutation, where time unfolds at increasing speed. Technological, social and political change have altered the way we see and perceive our surroundings, images, objects, and even our history. The virtual sphere has also played a role in augmenting reality and history. The exhibition – through the work of 28 artists from across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America – seeks to encourage us to take more time to ponder and reflect on our history of material culture, and really experience our experiences. Kholeif explains in his curatorial overview:
This exhibition is a provocation. It seeks to show how material culture can be reimagined through the lenses of artists whose political agency, activism and astute observations encourage us to extend the limits of our beliefs. It considers how economies have formed around technological culture, how narrative is created and deconstructed, and how these forces of change enable a reconstitution, or indeed a restitution, of a history lost or even unknown. Drifting in and out of hegemonies and entrenched structures of power, here the sensorial and the bodily intertwine, becoming archaeological sediments in the landscape of Sharjah and imploring viewers to consider their complicity in a world that is forever slipping away.
London- and Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s new commission Once Removed is an audio-visual installation that functions as a portrait of the time-travelling life and work of Bassel Abi Chahine, a man whose supernatural experience led him to straddle two generational periods – his own, living under the shadow of a war past, and that of his ‘alter ego’, living the war. Abi Chahine, a thirty-one-year-old writer and historian, managed to create an unparalleled archive of extremely rare objects, photographs and interviews related to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) militias, led by Walid Jumblatt during the Lebanese Civil War. Abi Chahine experienced “flashbacks” from a previous life – lucid and personal memories of the war – and came to realise that these were due to the fact that he was the reincarnation of a young soldier, Yousef Fouad Al Jawhary, who had died in the town of Aley, Lebanon on 26 February 1984 at the age of 16. He easily (re)learnt to identify all types of weapons and their origins in images, and found instant connection with former PLA soldiers and commanders, who were at ease to tell their stories to him, believing him to be a reincarnated comrade.
Nigerian artists Otobong Nkanga and Emeka Ogboh won the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2019 for their collaborative installation Aging Ruins Dream Only to Recall the Hard Chisel from the Past, a commission for SB14 that comprises a series of multimedia interventions in the heritage house Bait Al Aboudi and the surrounding grounds in Al Mureijah Square. The work features a multi-channel sound installation, sculpture and light installation, and poetry. Located in the untended garden of the Bait Al Aboudi building, the piece explores the cycle of life, death and rebirth through the land, the human (and animal) body, the organic and the inorganic, the animate and the inanimate, and the visible and the invisible. Aging Ruins references dichotomies such as prosperity and depression, hopeful beginnings and demise, to eventually point towards the possibility of rebirth, with each element of the installation playing its symbolic role. Circular craters framed by sand mounds contain sea water, which after evaporation will leave traces of saline, like ruins. Speakers play a range of natural sounds, a recording of an Emirati ‘rain song’ performed by children in Sharjah and texts conceived from the perspectives of water, earth and trees, written and performed by Nkanga.
Damascus-born artist Hrair Sarkissian explores notions of time, extiction and the migratory experience in three distinct works, partially commissioned for SB14. The relentless passing of time is evident in Residue (2019), a portrait of a woman 3D scanned from a gelatin silver print negative found in a shop in Damascus (ca. 1950s to 1970s). The distorted image and its imperfections represent the potential loss experienced by the woman and the ruins of her world left today. In Final Flight (2018–2019), the artist explores the ‘flight towards extinction’ of the Northern Bald Ibis, the descendant of the bird represented in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The work comprises sculptures of the birds’ skulls made with high-resolution photogrammetry 3D technology.
Originally declared extinct in 1989, a surviving colony of seven was discovered in 2002 in the Syrian Desert near Palmyra. With the war, in 2011 the conservation programme experienced cuts in funding, and the birds disappeared from the site in 2014, around the time of the destruction of Palmyra. In his 2016 two-channel video Horizon, Sarkissian traces one of the shortest and most travelled sea routes used by refugees, from Kaş on the southwestern Turkish shore, across the Mycale Strait, to the island of Megisti on the edge of southeastern Greece. Depicting the Mediterranean route from above, the video captures the danger of the sea and its unpredictable nature. The horizon, a window onto a hopeful future, where the past becomes bitter-sweet memory.
Receiving a special mention by the Sharjah Biennial Prize Jury, Encroachments is an SB14 commission by London-based Shezad Dawood. The artist often creates narratives drawing on history that explore interconnections across far-reaching lines of enquiry, geographic locations and communities. In his VR environment at SB14, Dawood explores the “grey area of ownership” and ideas of sovereignty, private property, and the politics of space in Lahore and Karachi. ‘Encroachment’ refers to the backlash against illegal structures built into and onto existing private and state infrastructure. This phenomenon brings attention to the lack of social space in private and public land ownership, and the poorly assisted needs of the population at large. Central to the VR experience is the proposed building for the US Embassy in Karachi, a subject of Dawood’s extensive research. Now existing in a state of limbo, the building was designed in the 1950s by Richard Neutra. It was only completed when Pakistan’s capital had already moved to Islamabad, and was finally sold by the US State Department in 2014. The VR environment features parallel locations, including the renowned colonial-era bookshop Ferozsons established in 1894 in Lahore, a secret passage into the Reagan years, and a videogame arcade filled with anti-Soviet propaganda.
Look for Me All Around You
Featuring 28 artists and artist groups, “Look for Me All Around You” is curated by Claire Tancons, a curator and scholar who recently curated the third Origins season, National Sawdust, New York (2017–2018) and was co-curator for the first edition of Tout-Monde, Caribbean Contemporary Arts Festival (in partnership with the French Embassy Cultural Services), Miami (2018–2019). Following her curatorial practice invested in the discourse and practice of the postcolonial politics of production and exhibition, and with a specialisation in performance, her SB14 exhibition confronts notions of diaspora, migration and pilgrimage. She calls it “an open platform of migrant images and fugitive forms”. “Look for Me All Around You” features the work of 28 artists from Asia, North and South America, and Africa, and their respective diasporas. The show takes as a point of departure political activist and pan-African leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr (1887–1940) and his unrelenting address to “Look for me in the whirlwind or a storm, look for me all around you…” (1925). The exhibition looks at diaspora as “an aporetic phenomenon of the contemporary”, including human, semantic and material forms of displacement. In light of such displacements, the show encourages to look beyond what we see, to understand the many forms of perception. Tancons explains:
As a contrapuntal proposal that may not fully be registered in the realm of the retinal embedded in hegemonic structures of looking, learning and feeling, Look for Me All Around You manifests in a state of emergence under conditions of performance. It revels in displaced artefacts, coded languages, sonic disturbances, transient presences, light flashes and shadow imprints, revealing the immiscible historical flows and comparable contemporary constituents of both the Arabian peninsula and the American continents and insular territories as results of human and natural resource extraction and exploitation. An always already othered time-space discontinuum, Look for Me All Around You bears witness to the imperilment of the contemporary within the atomisedspace between ‘me’ and ‘you’. What is being ‘looked for’ is not what is being ‘looked at’—if only it could be seen.
Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa creates work that often references art historical imagery. His images, installations and videos explore power relations, displays of masculinity and societal tensions. Blida-Joinville, his commission for SB14, received a special mention from the Sharjah Biennial Prize Jury. The artist plots a physical and psychological exploration of society by bringing into conversation two institutions and their history: the Psychiatric Hospital Frantz Fanon in Blida, Algeria and the Kalba kindergarten, the location of the work. The hospital was built in the 1930s by French architects Garner et Petit, and the kindergarten was designed by Arab modernist architects George Rais and Jaafar Tukan and built between 1973 and 1975.
Bourouissa has placed a three-dimensional wooden structure based on the plan of the hospital in the kindergarten grounds. The artist connects the two by referencing Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, describing spaces that are somehow parallel but ‘other’ and tied to notions of utopia. In addition, interspersed throughout the space are plants that recall the gardening therapy introduced at the Fanon hospital by a patient, Bourlem Mohamed. The artist has also invited students to paint pictures of plants on the walls.
Sharjah-born artist Alaa Edris uses photography, film and performance to investigate her social urban environment, as well as folklore, gender and belief by creating new perspectives on architecture, myth and social history. Her SB14 commission The Black Boxes of Observational Activity is a site-specific installation on the rooftop of Gallery 1 in Sharjah Art Foundation’s Al Mureijah Square, comprising a series of standing black boxes that are reminiscent of the camera obscura and observation deck telescopes. The boxes point to historically significant parts of Sharjah, like Bank Street and Khalid Port, but instead of a lens they have a screen installed inside, screening a video recording of a location filmed in the recent past but manipulated with a futuristic sci-fi aesthetic. The viewer becomes a vehicle through which change is processed, able to see, at the same time, reality in the present and in an imagined future.
In her performance, moving image, sculpture and installation work, Wu Tsang explores states of connectedness and in-betweenness. With a background in film, she merges documentary and fiction, creating a “third space” to question the relationship between sociality and its images. In her One emerging from a point of view, co-commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation and Onassis Fast Forward Festival 6, she explores this third space by overlapping two video projections. The videos are both set on the northeastern shores of Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey through which, since 2011, more than half a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa have crossed into Europe. One follows the story of Yassmine Flowers, a young Moroccan woman, who arrives in Athens after months of travel through Turkey and Lesbos’ Moria camp. The other portrays Eirini Vourloumis, a photojournalist assigned to document the crisis in Lesbos, who becomes personally involved with the fishing village of Skala Sikamineas. In her distinctive style, bleeding and cutting images to overlap and intertwine their parallel narratives, Wu Tsang creates a hybrid fantasy drawing from history, mythology and science-fiction.
Through drawing, spatial installations and film, Kuwaiti artist Alia Farid explores the relationships between the shaping of environment and perception, against the context of the colonial histories of her two countries of origin, Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Her SB14 commission At the Time of the Ebb is a video work she created to document the surviving festival traditions of an Iranian island that lives according to its own time and seasonal cycles. Farid travelled 100 nautical kilometres from the easternmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Iranian island of Qeshm to film the annual celebration of Nowruz Sayadeen (in English, ‘Fisherman’s New Year). The work features local residents’ performances that draw attention to their customs, traditions, material surroundings and natural environment. Perhaps taking inspiration from her own mixed origins and merging of cultures, Farid brings Qeshm to Sharjah seeking to highlight the overlapping identity of Iran and the gulf. The United Arab Emirates specifically display, both historically and today, the presence and influence of Iranian trade, tradition and customs.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia