Film, Monumental Installation, and Diversity Shine in Sharjah Biennial 15
Join Haley Lynn Jones as she shares information about her travels to 2023’s Sharjah Biennial with the High’s Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, Lauren Tate Baeza.
By Haley Lynn Jones, 2022–2023 Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellow in African Art, High Museum of Art
The Sharjah Biennial, conceived by influential Nigerian curator and writer Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), forwards the goal of spotlighting non-Western contemporary art and celebrating critical narratives that challenge the status quo. Sharjah Art Foundation director Sheikha Hoor al Qasimi curated this year’s fifteenth iteration of the biennial under the theme “Thinking Historically in the Present,” on view through June 2023. This thesis resounds loud and clear across the diverse offerings of the one hundred and fifty featured artists, thirty of whom produced site-specific work for the biennial. International in its scope, the biennial features a strong representation of women artists, Indigenous artists from across the globe, and African and African diaspora artists. I traveled to the Sharjah Biennial during its opening week (February 7–11, 2023) with another first-time attendee and visitor to the United Arab Emirates, Lauren Tate Baeza, Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at the High Museum.
Our experiences at the biennial began with a performance by Australian artist Brook Andrew titled burbangbuwanha winha-nga-nha, which translates from Wiradjuri, an Indigenous Australian language from New South Wales, as “Returned Ceremony of Memory.” This performance turns a courtyard in Al Mureijah Square into a ceremonial site, featuring sculpted ritual objects and animal hides positioned within a circle of small vessels burning incense. The performers, Aaron Reeder, Sahar Mohdali, Malavika Suresh, and Ashraf Awad and the Ayala Ensemble, animate the space through spoken word, singing, and drumming that both laments the removal and rejoices in the restitution of indigenous cultural objects. This hypnotic performance, a harbinger of a biennial simultaneously global in its purpose yet strikingly local in its approach and feeling, unfolded as birdsong enlivened the endless blue sky above us.
We spent the second day of our visit more than an hour’s drive away from Sharjah, through the desert and mountains into another part of the emirate: the cities of Kalba and Khor Fakkan on the Gulf of Oman coast. In Kalba, opening-week events took place in two spectacular and inventive venues. First, a former kindergarten, still in a seventies modernist architectural style decorated with the murals of its students, serves as an intimate and charming gallery space for smaller-scale installations, photographs, and works on paper. Second, the former Kalba Ice Factory — massive and nestled beside a coastal mangrove forest with views of the ocean and the surprisingly close mountains of Oman — hosts the biennial’s largest-scale installations. This includes the vast wooden cornucopia of Duty Colossus (2023) by American artist Nari Ward and the absorbing forest of Uprooted (2020–2022) by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Ghanaian installation artist Ibrahim Mahama’s site-specific installation A Tale of Time/Purple Republic (2023), an enormous tapestry drawing from a sculpted loom and draped across a shaded exterior section of the building, features stunning handwoven components.
Back in Sharjah, in a striking star-shaped Brutalist building called the Flying Saucer, we saw the work of a single artist who had command over the entire venue in the embodiment of a trend Lauren and I noticed at this biennial: artists afforded the maximum amount of physical and conceptual space needed to fully execute their vision. New York–based artist Kambui Olujimi presents In the Dark, We Lose Our Edges (2023), consisting of a series of works on paper encircling the outer gallery of the Flying Saucer and a sculpture and sound-based installation in the interior circular room. The works on paper include diptychs of cyanotypes and watercolor depicting revolutionary figures and pop culture icons, while the central installation features three sculpted gold busts rising from dunes of striking blue sand. While weaving my way through this installation, I noticed what felt like an Easter egg: a sculpted face no longer mounted like the rest, partially buried in the sand behind an artificial boulder like a relic from the past slowly resurfacing.
Yinka Shonibare CBE’s installation Decolonized Structures (2022) dominates the first exhibition space upon entering the Old Al Diwan Al Amiri, a former ruler’s court turned art venue for the biennial in the coastal town of Al Hamriyah. The installation comprises seven sculptures upon plinths, arranged in a loosely circular formation around the room. Each is a reproduction of an existing monument to different British colonial figures in London, with some critical changes. To undermine each figure’s monumentality, Shonibare sculpted them in smaller than life size and opted for fiberglass as his material to avoid the prestigious associations of marble and bronze. He painted the fiberglass to resemble the Dutch wax print textiles that have become his visual and conceptual signature, recalling the global history of colonialism and questioning notions of authenticity. This installation recognizes and leverages the close conceptual ties between the process of decolonization and the critique, alteration, and destruction of monuments.
In addition to installations, film works were strongly represented at the biennial and were impressive in their formal diversity and strong adherence to the biennial’s theme. Most of the Khorfakkan Art Centre venue is devoted to screening films such as Emirati Lebanese artist Farah Al Qasimi’s Um Al Dhabab (Mother of Fog) (2023), a magical realist romp through historical and contemporary myths of piracy and its connections to Gulf colonial history. British Ghanaian artist John Akomfrah’s film Arcadia (2023), consisting of five hypnotic channels in a massive indoor theater in Al Mureijah Square, meditates on climate change and the ecological landscape of colonialism. Our favorite film, though, in Old Al Diwan Al Amiri, was Trinidadian filmmaker Maya Cozier’s Kambule (2022), an impeccably shot short film celebrating and partially reenacting the role of women in the spontaneous Canboulay riots of 1881, in which Afro-Creole revelers fought against Spanish colonial police who threatened to curb their Carnival celebrations.
Quality examples of drawing, painting, and photography, while numerous, seemed less dominant due to the strength, scale, and saturation of the film and installation works. Botswanan multimedia artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s 2020 series of pencil and oil on wood panels was a highlight of those works currently on display in the long corridors of the Sharjah Art Museum. Additional standouts from this venue are British artist Kimathi Donkor’s paintings, which reinsert Black figures into canonically Western visual art settings to heighten and dramatize the subject matter of state racial violence; and Iraqi artist Saddam Jumaily’s overtly political, surreal, and often disturbing paintings showing the uneasy relationship between the past and the future in a world of conflict and environmental collapse. A personal favorite of mine was the display in Al Hamriyah Studios of Moroccan artist Nabil El Makhloufi’s immersive, dreamlike figurative paintings, together forming a visually stunning and quietly profound meditation on masculinity, migration, and alienation. His naturalistic depictions of men and boys within disembodied, often watery backdrops, speak to the transient and ambiguous feeling of socially and physically navigating cultural gray areas.
During our final evening before returning to Atlanta, we experienced a work in Sharjah Arts Square that embodies the strengths and generative possibilities of the biennial. Commissioned for the biennial, Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s multimedia installation Murmullo Familiar (Family Whisper) from her series Liminal Circularity Part 1 (2021–2023) includes paintings, family heirlooms, and historical ephemera that together tell a story of the African diaspora via Campos-Pons’s family narrative. I will never forget Lauren’s awestruck reaction to seeing the three large-scale and colorful paintings by Campos-Pons, an artist more widely known for her film and photography. The installation incorporates red sand from Sharjah that evokes for the artist her place of origin, Matanzas, Cuba. Such blending of local and global, past and present, to create something forward thinking and new is exactly what this year’s Sharjah Biennial is all about.
