Sharjah Biennial 14
The 2019 edition of the Sharjah Biennial, founded by Hoor Al Qasimi in 1993, explores the notion of the “echo chamber” – a relevant metaphor, according to curators Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons, to describe the enclosed system of knowledge and information in the contemporary age. Featuring nearly ninety artists from around the globe – Allora & Calzadilla, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ian Cheng, Heather Phillipson, Wu Tsang, and Qiu Zhijie, to name a few – “Leaving the Echo Chamber” shows over sixty newly commissioned works. L’Officiel Art met with the three curators, each presenting a distinct group exhibition in response to the theme of the biennial, which takes place in different locations in the Sharjah Emirate until June 10.
L’OFFICIEL ART: How is the overarching theme of the Sharjah Biennial – how to resist and reshape the “echo chamber” of contemporary life – addressed in the exhibitions you have curated?
ZOE BUTT: “Journey Beyond the Arrow” argues that the way forward to increase the echo (the human rituals, language, cultural practices and beliefs) within the chamber of contemporary life is by acknowledging (thus not assuming) the cause and effect of human action – to not focus on the destination of the arrow but rather at the bow which launches its existence. Thus much of the art presented here encompasses artistic provocations of History and its (written) context, re-presenting fact as fiction (and fiction as fact), arguing (and thus celebrating) the necessary, innovative movement of mind and matter and method across the globe.
OMAR KHOLEIF: The starting point for my exhibition “Making New Time” was to consider how technology led to a fastpaced media-saturated sphere that was spinning the same news cycles over and over again. I thought about how to contradict this notion of speed, and being linked to time, that unit of experience that helps define a life lived, or in some cases a life lost. How can we slow things down? How do we look back at history and consider the sedimentation of time through things? The artworks on display tell us a story about time, speed and the burnout that comes from chasing the cycle: how do we avoid the norms, shift the status quo, move beyond? Well, certainly, that is by revealing narratives (and ways of working) that are rarely told – giving voice to stories that have otherwise been silenced.
CLAIRE TANCONS: “Look for Me All Around You” is an attempt to chart a global history, taking the Americas and the Emirates as seemingly distant yet surprisingly proximate coordinates following certain modes of migration, development and labor. This immiscibility between Atlantic and Indian Ocean histories leads to a dislocation of diasporic narratives nevertheless treading comparably tumultuous waters. The creation of other narratives is always linked to opening new fields of cognition and perception. For the latter, “Look for Me
All Around You” plays host to works that evade visual prehension, resist stable physical materialization and embrace fluid perceptual modes – the aural, the ephemeral, the intangible – generating an open platform of migrant images and fugitive forms. Further, spanning the East and West coasts of the Arabian peninsula across two Emirates, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain, and two cities, Sharjah City and Kalba in myriad non-museological spaces, “Look for Me All Around” attempts to contrast gallery-based and object-centered museological developments in the region, and offer instead more intangible means of perceiving and preserving an artistic experience.
Could you describe one of the new commissions in your show?
ZB: One is the work by Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. When he traveled to Senegal, he met the descendants of French Senegalese soldiers, whose Vietnamese wives were brought to Dakar (sometimes unwillingly), following the French defeat in Vietnam in 1954. The stories of these children and grandchildren struck a particular nerve in Tuan, himself a boat refugee of the Vietnam War, drawn to how little is known of these children of the Empire, whose own country cares little about their fate. The commission takes form as a 4-channel video installation, whereby these oral accounts are filmically re-enacted.
OK: Marwa Arsanios has produced a new film and installation called Who’s Afraid of Ideology II, which looks at the precarious lives of women farmers in Rojava and the Beqaa Valley in Syria. These women create an autonomous agricultural movement – free of men. In her film, Arsanios considers what it means to live a communal life and what kinds of care go into the making of a feminist community in a contested post-conflict situation. This interest in feminist discourses and processes is reflected in Alfredo Jaar’s 33 Women from 100 Women, a new rendering of an ongoing work in which Jaar sheds light on female activists and political figures who have historically been marginalized or hidden from view. Jaar’s de-colonial map (which looks at women from outside Western Europe and North America) is like this biennial, seeking to put into conversation narratives that are traditionally hidden from view.
CT: All twenty-seven works in “Look for Me All Around You” are new commissions, so selecting just one is a daunting if not downright problematic task. Instead of engaging in such a narrow process of exclusion, let me share with you the highly evocative titles of all the new commissions, to provide some insight regarding their content: The Trans-National; Alliance for a sunny world or the Rainbow Serpent flows in free rivers and Janna Dam the Second Murder of Adonis; Specters of Noon; Time Travel; The Intrinsic Tendency of the ENS Sign; Suntitled; Blida/Joinville; Sabor a Lágrima and Eslabón; All around us – elsewheres are beginnings and endings; Dig and Fly; Infinite Sun; I Belong to the Distance; The Black Boxes of Observational Activity; At the Time of the Ebb; No Prey, No Pay; Perruques Architectures Émirats Arabes Unis; Sympoiesis Observatory; The Filipino Superwoman Band and Passion of Darna; Untitled (inwardness, juices, natures); Massive Kinship; Patakí 21; Imperfect Isometry; The Land of Zanj; Any Way the Wind Blows; The Gulf Project Camp; Even the Stars Look Lonesome; One emerging from a point of view.
How does your exhibition project enter into dialogue with the other two and the cultural landscape of Sharjah as well?
ZB: Questions of time and its shaping of potential (as curated by Omar Kholeif) resonate, for example, with my preoccupation with empathy and the need to grant time in the shaping of human cause and effect with its embrace (evidenced in works like those of Lee Mingwei, 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit and Nalini Malani); while the provocation of the senses without favoring sight (as curated by Claire Tancons) resonates with my preoccupation with music and the need to understand its history, as a source of critical reflections on social injustice and human migration.
OK: The biennial as a whole responds to the context of Sharjah through the specificity of the site and the projects that artists have chosen to produce. For example, artists Otobong Nkanga and Emeka Ogboh reflect on the urban topography of Sharjah, taking over the ruins of the historic Bait Al Aboudi. Here they have crafted an alternative sonic and spatial echo chamber. In this open-air space viewers are confronted with wells filled with salt water. As the sun beats down, the arid landscape of Sharjah consumes this water, leaving traces of salt behind it. A tree in the courtyard starts to talk to you. It has become animate through sound. It tells you the story of how it became addicted to saltwater but then died. The sound of wind and waves suddenly rises and then that of children from Sharjah singing a rain song. This is a thumping, beating installation that literally brings the desert landscape of Sharjah to life and into conversation with the materiality of the art objects on view. Sharjah here becomes not just a subject, but a physical material to be questioned, interrogated, and turned into a realm of multiple fictions.
CT: As outlined above, “Look for Me All Around You” is a highly site- and context-specific open platform, at times counter-museological, at other times narrowly exhibitionary, epitomizingthe challenges and opportunities in Sharjah, the Emirates and the wider Gulf region in terms of creating other models of artistic narration, production, and presentation. The latter aspects are addressed by both of my colleagues as well, in ways that are at once contrasting – Omar Kholeif’s attention to the sensorial through the digital and the virtual – and comparable – Zoe Butt’s interest in expansive diasporic narratives. By playing to their strengths in terms of historical, art historical, political, conceptual and formal interests, the curators bounce distinct echoes which resonate together in the cacophony of contemporary artistic creation.
“Leaving the Echo Chamber. Sharjah Biennial 14.” Sharjah, various locations. Through June 10.