The indigenous, the current and the art of the Sharjah Biennial
The Sharjah creek runs parallel to the old Sharjah market. While searching for freshly grinded turmeric for a friend, we came across Photo Kegham, quietly nestled between the shops.
Photo Kegham, part of the 16th Sharjah Biennial, is a reproduction of Gaza's first photo studio, originally located on Gaza City's central Omar al-Mukhtar street. The installation draws from an archive preserved by artist Kegham Djeghalian, grandson of Kegham Djeghalian Sr., who founded the studio. Born in Anatolia, Djeghalian Sr. fled with his family to Syria during the Armenian Genocide, later moving to Jerusalem, where he trained in photography, before eventually settling in Gaza and establishing Photo Kegham in 1944.
Djeghalian curated the content of three boxes of his grandfather's negatives, revealing an intimate portrayal of everyday life in Gaza. Before its current iteration at the Sharjah Biennial, the project was presented in various forms: at Rawabet Art Space in Cairo (2021), the Institut français d'Égypte (2024), the Photographers' Gallery in London (2024), and Fonderie Kugler in Geneva (2025) — each offering a distinct curatorial approach, beginning with Cairo.
At the biennial, a selection of the photographs are separately exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum's main venue, restaging glimpses of lives once lived in Gaza. Each photograph carries with it a lineage of histories and experiences to be imagined through the captivity of the image.
But then there is the shop outside, its stark presence signaling disappearance more than return. The literal apparition of Gaza in Sharjah is disorienting. The architectural reconstruction of Photo Kegham's facade is striking — subtly embedded within the fabric of Sharjah's old market, yet unmistakably staged. In contrast to the generative, layered substance of the photographs in the museum, the careful replication of the studio verges on fetishism.
The tension between art as spectacle and its political potential is a defining and perhaps inevitable feature of the Sharjah Biennial. Biennials amplify the question through the density of artistic production, but also, perhaps, augment the promise: will this profusion of art sharpen our attention? Will it unsettle us? Will it reorient our perception? Or does the very inclusion in the biennial risk neutralizing art, muting its performative potential? Does the biennial open up a platform for possibility, or does it risk becoming a structure of containment? What, if anything, allows art to exceed the terms of its exhibition?
The curators of the 16th Sharjah Biennial — Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz — pose a perennial question: 'What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on?' The answer, for many participating artists, lies somewhere in indigenous roots.
Over 40 of the biennial's 190 participating artists center indigeneity in their work, celebrating marginalized cultures of origin while mourning erasure and dispossession. Some works present a spectacle of indigeneity, a quest for visibility, a form of signage within the binds of a contemporary art biennial. Others stage indigeneity to pose questions or offer propositions. While the former tend to perform a predictable role of political responsibility within the exhibition, the latter manage to transcend its confines.
One of the works that depart from indigeneity to ask political questions is Hylozoic/Desires, the mutli-media performance duo of Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. Their film, The Hedge of Halomancy (2024), features Mayalee, a woman performing rituals using the same salt extracted by the British from the native Great Indian Hedge in the late 1800s. The Hedge of Halomancy contrasts rare archival findings documenting the salt extractions, in which its protagonist appears only marginally as a 'dancing girl' or a courtesean, with the fictional account in which she performs a salt ritual.
The duo also present a series of staged photographs from the film's imagined world. One of them, titled عراف الهالة (The Halomancer), portrays a diviner who seeks insight by casting salt into the air. For the duo, what appears in the archive as a courtesan resisting the loss of her right to salt becomes a woman enacting a ritual. We don't know what made this piece stand out in its wrestling with the native's right — is it the rigor of the research and its layered, speculative morphing? the quality of the form that both reveals and withholds? Perhaps not knowing is better.
The biennial is dizzying, with countless works that reenact indigeneity in a quest to make the native visible or to declare the plight of the indigenous. This presence demarcated the politics of this edition, yet it did not pass without the tension of being curiously housed in Sharjah, where indigeneity is neither clearly defined nor synonymous with marginalization. But the oddities of Sharjah's homemaking for the art world is nothing new.
Sri Lankan artist Rajni Perera paints Lover not a Fighter (2024), which takes inspiration from traditional oral rituals suppressed by the colonization of his home country. American artist Sky Hopinka from the Ho-Chunk Nation of the Midwest mounts a three-channel road trip video titled In Dreams and Autumn (2021), where they use Chinuk Wawa, an indigenous language, as a 'means of return.'
Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce, descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia, presents Operation Buffalo, an installation that opens the Hamriyah coastal site with shimmering glass pieces suspended from the sky like atmosphere — the work is a spectral prelude to this liminal industrial shoreline north of Sharjah, one of the Biennial's key off-site venues. Their technique of making gestures to the mushroom clouds left by nuclear tests in the Maralinga desert of South Australia in the 1950s — tests that contaminated land inhabited by indigenous communities for years after.
Hopinka's images are scenic, Perera's paintings adroit, and Scarce's installation spectacular. Yet their aesthetic craft somewhat lock their political potential, they are often consumed in their exhibitionism.
In a way, interventions like Fabio Morais's murals unintentionally respond to the dilemma of aesthetics dispersing political potential. The Brazilian artist turns aesthetics into gesture, placing discourse at the forefront. One of his murals reads: 'We fulfilled pacts and agreements, but suddenly…' — a sentence that repeats and then fragments into scattered letters. Morais's nod is to the shaky foundation of the textual tradition of the law, but the erosion he evokes could just as easily belong to contemporary art.
One of this year's biennial exhibition sites is the decommissioned Al-Qasimiya School, renovated in 2019 by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Vacant of schooling, yet full of its traces — educational signage and classrooms encircling a playground. It was one of the most magical spaces we encountered. We wonder if it's a kind of nostalgia for a school that has not yet been, a space of childhood emptied of indoctrination, where art takes on the role of pedagogy, while admitting to its vulnerability, its shakiness.
The school holds one of the works most resonant with us, and with anyone grappling with being an incapacitated witness to Israel's genocide in Gaza, a genocide unfolding in intimate spatial and psychic proximity, the stuff of hauntology.
Gazan artists Mohamed al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar were invited to exhibit works they managed to rescue during their escape from Israeli airstrikes on the Bureij camp in Deir al-Balah. Hawajri shows several of his inked bone-based sculptures alongside a vivid, staggering painting of their flight from war — a scene also depicted in Mattar's works and in a video by the two artists' eldest son, Ahmed. Their younger children, Mahmoud and Lea, contribute too: Mahmoud with crafted puppets whose wide eyes stare back at us, and Lea with drawings of houses, birds and suns, often delicately adorned with pasted bougainvillea petals.
The exhibition does not change our position as incapacitated witnesses to the genocide. If anything, it throws into sharper relief the dissonance of our daily lives as politically engaged, middle-class cultural workers — lives that, in moments like this, feel unavoidably complicit, even hedonistic. But this exhibition specifically offers a slight reprieve from the burden of consuming the spectacle of art in the context of genocide. It felt like a kind of homecoming.
One can barely escape seeing the pieces as both artworks and survivors — self-contained objects in a spectacle, and at once witnesses to and traces of their conditions of making. These are works that carry more than the intention of art; their fleeing journey is now part of them. They bear the messiness of staying alive amid genocide — the horror not yet rendered legible, the fugitivity they aspire to.
When writing critique, we are often invited to learn how to read works immanently, but in this art space, mounted in a bygone school, we find ourselves unlearning the rules. Each work gestures toward something beyond itself. They are bearers of their own negativity.
Palestinian singer and sound artist Bint Mbareh presented a new sound work titled What's Left? (2025) at Qasimiya as well. She assembled a choir as a communal act, summoning the air it takes to vibrate herself away from the heaviness of genocide through singing. The piece draws on her research into communal singing practices around rainfall in Palestine — traditions that resist colonial narratives of water scarcity.
Like other ancestry-bound artists in the biennial, Bint Mbareh works with revolutionary songs passed down across generations. Among them is the iconic سـاعة التحرير دقّت (The hour of liberation has arrived), featured in Jewish-born Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Sorour's film about the Dhofar rebellion against British colonizers in Oman. Layered and embodied, yet deeply contemporary, the work manages to flip the game of nostalgia. And just as we might ask the exhausted question, does nostalgia impede urgency?, What's Left? seems to offer another: Can sharpening our gaze on what we are nostalgic for liberate it from impotence?
But the perils of nostalgia are often evoked in sound — and the double LP on vinyl Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2025), also presented in Qasimiya, got to us. We were drawn in by a magnetic remix of a chant that always managed to tremble through us: علي وعلي وعلي الصوت اللي بيهتف ما بيموت (Raise, raise, raise your voice; those who chant do not die). The remix, by Ruanne Abu Rahme and Bassel Abbas, stems from their ongoing performance May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth (2020 – ongoing), and features music commissioned from DJ Haram, Julmud, Makimakkuk, Muqataa, Freddie June, among others. The LP is part of a broader show, Speaking with the Dead, curated by Palestinian writer and curator Adam HajYahia, and undertaken by Bilnaes, or In the Negative, an 'adisciplinary' platform that also intervenes in how artistic collaborations are distributed.
HajYahia engages the question of debt as a discursive device indexing colonial history and an ongoing capitalist condition. With it, he brings together Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça's raw scribbles, Asian-American artist Martin Wong's bestial painting of White Cypress, Palestinian artists Dina Mimi's montage of images of resistance for liberation and Muhannad al-Azzeh's embodied facial sketches of Palestinian imprisonment. There is nothing poetic or complete in this show — it is precisely 'in the negative,' and this is where its authority lies: in its wrestling with art forms that exceed the totality of discourse, and with discourse that floods art with its certainty.
Many artists in Sharjah worked with textiles, and each time we encountered these works, it felt like a hug. Isn't clothing a form of hugging? In Qasimiya, the school's central grounds are embraced by recycled cotton bedsheets, pillowcases, burial cloth and other fabrics — including silk and chiffon — by Emirati artist Hashel al-Lamki. One hanging cloth even had some questions for us:
Were you the reason behind someone's tears?
Were you the cause of an animal's distress?
Did you torture a plant and forget to give it water?
The work's statement claims to summon wisdom. Its presence amid classrooms housing different artworks evokes the kind of knowledge weaving that once threaded through schools.
In Dhaid, a more distant oasis in Sharjah, the biennial extended into a palace, an old clinic, and a farm — spaces where the artworks seemed to take up more room. We walked into a formidable pool-like architectural installation and recognized Mahmoud Khaled, a compatriot and member of our community in Egypt. In Pool of Perspective – 2030 (2025), he stages a voided future as a site of malfunction, referencing the mega-national construction projects back home, laden with the promise of futurity. This illusory future is embedded in the structure through various forms of optical play.
We also found Wael Shawky's I am Hymns of the New Temples (2023) and enjoyed a fragment of his theatrical production crafted through tableaus that fantasize the real. The work belongs to a similar repertoire of films Shawky makes, using similar form to stage a different protagonist: In this case, it's the story of the ruins of Pompeii.
On our way out, we stopped at the farm in Dhaid, where musicians and sound artists composed with trees, waterways and other lifeforms in the deserted oasis. Among them were Joe Namy — whose main work Dub Plant, tracing connections between radio and agriculture, we sadly missed — Başak Günak, Sandy Chamoun, Hauptmeier|Recker, Berke Can Özcan and Sary Moussa. It was magical.
Many of the works predictably engaged with ecological questions, especially around resources. Italian Libyan artist Adelita Husney-Bey uses art and pedagogy to think with water about scarcity, famine and colonialism. Brazilian artist Luana Vitra imagines attraction and desire between minerals as a refusal of extraction for profit. Filipina-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang takes us to the curious worlds of pearl diving and industrialization in the Arabian Gulf, the Philippines and China.
From the Gulf, most of the art deals with similar questions. Saudi artist Ayman Zedani spotlights an ancient fungi, recovered in Saudi Arabia, in an experimental film about its violent extraction — an echo of the oil industry. Kuwaiti artist Monira al-Qadiri presents an oil refinery that shimmers as both metropolis and sci-fi city. Bahraini artist Mariam Alnoaimi collaborates with fishermen and biologists to explore the Gulf's waters not as sites of trade and transfer, but as lived environments.
An unconventional work in this Gulf tapestry is Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah, who turns more directly to the everyday. Her You Ask, We Answer (2024) — a massive canvas sprawling across several rooms — brims with images, paintings, and collage. It's playful, ceaseless, whimsical and doesn't care to exceed its own aesthetic momentum.
On the short drive back to Ajman — just 15 minutes, though it often feels like crossing into another world — we tried to recall what stayed with us. The smallest of the seven emirates, Ajman hasn't caught up with the global integration spree that animates the UAE's vision. It's a rougher edged, laid-back space, where labor is visible and contemporary art is absent. In a reading group on Aesthetic Theory, we learned that art must turn against itself. That line returned to us as we revised the show into memory. We imagined fugitive artworks following us into Ajman. This is probably the art that turns against itself.
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Mada
3 days ago
- Mada
The indigenous, the current and the art of the Sharjah Biennial
The Sharjah creek runs parallel to the old Sharjah market. While searching for freshly grinded turmeric for a friend, we came across Photo Kegham, quietly nestled between the shops. Photo Kegham, part of the 16th Sharjah Biennial, is a reproduction of Gaza's first photo studio, originally located on Gaza City's central Omar al-Mukhtar street. The installation draws from an archive preserved by artist Kegham Djeghalian, grandson of Kegham Djeghalian Sr., who founded the studio. Born in Anatolia, Djeghalian Sr. fled with his family to Syria during the Armenian Genocide, later moving to Jerusalem, where he trained in photography, before eventually settling in Gaza and establishing Photo Kegham in 1944. Djeghalian curated the content of three boxes of his grandfather's negatives, revealing an intimate portrayal of everyday life in Gaza. Before its current iteration at the Sharjah Biennial, the project was presented in various forms: at Rawabet Art Space in Cairo (2021), the Institut français d'Égypte (2024), the Photographers' Gallery in London (2024), and Fonderie Kugler in Geneva (2025) — each offering a distinct curatorial approach, beginning with Cairo. At the biennial, a selection of the photographs are separately exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum's main venue, restaging glimpses of lives once lived in Gaza. Each photograph carries with it a lineage of histories and experiences to be imagined through the captivity of the image. But then there is the shop outside, its stark presence signaling disappearance more than return. The literal apparition of Gaza in Sharjah is disorienting. The architectural reconstruction of Photo Kegham's facade is striking — subtly embedded within the fabric of Sharjah's old market, yet unmistakably staged. In contrast to the generative, layered substance of the photographs in the museum, the careful replication of the studio verges on fetishism. The tension between art as spectacle and its political potential is a defining and perhaps inevitable feature of the Sharjah Biennial. Biennials amplify the question through the density of artistic production, but also, perhaps, augment the promise: will this profusion of art sharpen our attention? Will it unsettle us? Will it reorient our perception? Or does the very inclusion in the biennial risk neutralizing art, muting its performative potential? Does the biennial open up a platform for possibility, or does it risk becoming a structure of containment? What, if anything, allows art to exceed the terms of its exhibition? The curators of the 16th Sharjah Biennial — Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz — pose a perennial question: 'What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on?' The answer, for many participating artists, lies somewhere in indigenous roots. Over 40 of the biennial's 190 participating artists center indigeneity in their work, celebrating marginalized cultures of origin while mourning erasure and dispossession. Some works present a spectacle of indigeneity, a quest for visibility, a form of signage within the binds of a contemporary art biennial. Others stage indigeneity to pose questions or offer propositions. While the former tend to perform a predictable role of political responsibility within the exhibition, the latter manage to transcend its confines. One of the works that depart from indigeneity to ask political questions is Hylozoic/Desires, the mutli-media performance duo of Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. Their film, The Hedge of Halomancy (2024), features Mayalee, a woman performing rituals using the same salt extracted by the British from the native Great Indian Hedge in the late 1800s. The Hedge of Halomancy contrasts rare archival findings documenting the salt extractions, in which its protagonist appears only marginally as a 'dancing girl' or a courtesean, with the fictional account in which she performs a salt ritual. The duo also present a series of staged photographs from the film's imagined world. One of them, titled عراف الهالة (The Halomancer), portrays a diviner who seeks insight by casting salt into the air. For the duo, what appears in the archive as a courtesan resisting the loss of her right to salt becomes a woman enacting a ritual. We don't know what made this piece stand out in its wrestling with the native's right — is it the rigor of the research and its layered, speculative morphing? the quality of the form that both reveals and withholds? Perhaps not knowing is better. The biennial is dizzying, with countless works that reenact indigeneity in a quest to make the native visible or to declare the plight of the indigenous. This presence demarcated the politics of this edition, yet it did not pass without the tension of being curiously housed in Sharjah, where indigeneity is neither clearly defined nor synonymous with marginalization. But the oddities of Sharjah's homemaking for the art world is nothing new. Sri Lankan artist Rajni Perera paints Lover not a Fighter (2024), which takes inspiration from traditional oral rituals suppressed by the colonization of his home country. American artist Sky Hopinka from the Ho-Chunk Nation of the Midwest mounts a three-channel road trip video titled In Dreams and Autumn (2021), where they use Chinuk Wawa, an indigenous language, as a 'means of return.' Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce, descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia, presents Operation Buffalo, an installation that opens the Hamriyah coastal site with shimmering glass pieces suspended from the sky like atmosphere — the work is a spectral prelude to this liminal industrial shoreline north of Sharjah, one of the Biennial's key off-site venues. Their technique of making gestures to the mushroom clouds left by nuclear tests in the Maralinga desert of South Australia in the 1950s — tests that contaminated land inhabited by indigenous communities for years after. Hopinka's images are scenic, Perera's paintings adroit, and Scarce's installation spectacular. Yet their aesthetic craft somewhat lock their political potential, they are often consumed in their exhibitionism. In a way, interventions like Fabio Morais's murals unintentionally respond to the dilemma of aesthetics dispersing political potential. The Brazilian artist turns aesthetics into gesture, placing discourse at the forefront. One of his murals reads: 'We fulfilled pacts and agreements, but suddenly…' — a sentence that repeats and then fragments into scattered letters. Morais's nod is to the shaky foundation of the textual tradition of the law, but the erosion he evokes could just as easily belong to contemporary art. One of this year's biennial exhibition sites is the decommissioned Al-Qasimiya School, renovated in 2019 by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Vacant of schooling, yet full of its traces — educational signage and classrooms encircling a playground. It was one of the most magical spaces we encountered. We wonder if it's a kind of nostalgia for a school that has not yet been, a space of childhood emptied of indoctrination, where art takes on the role of pedagogy, while admitting to its vulnerability, its shakiness. The school holds one of the works most resonant with us, and with anyone grappling with being an incapacitated witness to Israel's genocide in Gaza, a genocide unfolding in intimate spatial and psychic proximity, the stuff of hauntology. Gazan artists Mohamed al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar were invited to exhibit works they managed to rescue during their escape from Israeli airstrikes on the Bureij camp in Deir al-Balah. Hawajri shows several of his inked bone-based sculptures alongside a vivid, staggering painting of their flight from war — a scene also depicted in Mattar's works and in a video by the two artists' eldest son, Ahmed. Their younger children, Mahmoud and Lea, contribute too: Mahmoud with crafted puppets whose wide eyes stare back at us, and Lea with drawings of houses, birds and suns, often delicately adorned with pasted bougainvillea petals. The exhibition does not change our position as incapacitated witnesses to the genocide. If anything, it throws into sharper relief the dissonance of our daily lives as politically engaged, middle-class cultural workers — lives that, in moments like this, feel unavoidably complicit, even hedonistic. But this exhibition specifically offers a slight reprieve from the burden of consuming the spectacle of art in the context of genocide. It felt like a kind of homecoming. One can barely escape seeing the pieces as both artworks and survivors — self-contained objects in a spectacle, and at once witnesses to and traces of their conditions of making. These are works that carry more than the intention of art; their fleeing journey is now part of them. They bear the messiness of staying alive amid genocide — the horror not yet rendered legible, the fugitivity they aspire to. When writing critique, we are often invited to learn how to read works immanently, but in this art space, mounted in a bygone school, we find ourselves unlearning the rules. Each work gestures toward something beyond itself. They are bearers of their own negativity. Palestinian singer and sound artist Bint Mbareh presented a new sound work titled What's Left? (2025) at Qasimiya as well. She assembled a choir as a communal act, summoning the air it takes to vibrate herself away from the heaviness of genocide through singing. The piece draws on her research into communal singing practices around rainfall in Palestine — traditions that resist colonial narratives of water scarcity. Like other ancestry-bound artists in the biennial, Bint Mbareh works with revolutionary songs passed down across generations. Among them is the iconic سـاعة التحرير دقّت (The hour of liberation has arrived), featured in Jewish-born Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Sorour's film about the Dhofar rebellion against British colonizers in Oman. Layered and embodied, yet deeply contemporary, the work manages to flip the game of nostalgia. And just as we might ask the exhausted question, does nostalgia impede urgency?, What's Left? seems to offer another: Can sharpening our gaze on what we are nostalgic for liberate it from impotence? But the perils of nostalgia are often evoked in sound — and the double LP on vinyl Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2025), also presented in Qasimiya, got to us. We were drawn in by a magnetic remix of a chant that always managed to tremble through us: علي وعلي وعلي الصوت اللي بيهتف ما بيموت (Raise, raise, raise your voice; those who chant do not die). The remix, by Ruanne Abu Rahme and Bassel Abbas, stems from their ongoing performance May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth (2020 – ongoing), and features music commissioned from DJ Haram, Julmud, Makimakkuk, Muqataa, Freddie June, among others. The LP is part of a broader show, Speaking with the Dead, curated by Palestinian writer and curator Adam HajYahia, and undertaken by Bilnaes, or In the Negative, an 'adisciplinary' platform that also intervenes in how artistic collaborations are distributed. HajYahia engages the question of debt as a discursive device indexing colonial history and an ongoing capitalist condition. With it, he brings together Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça's raw scribbles, Asian-American artist Martin Wong's bestial painting of White Cypress, Palestinian artists Dina Mimi's montage of images of resistance for liberation and Muhannad al-Azzeh's embodied facial sketches of Palestinian imprisonment. There is nothing poetic or complete in this show — it is precisely 'in the negative,' and this is where its authority lies: in its wrestling with art forms that exceed the totality of discourse, and with discourse that floods art with its certainty. Many artists in Sharjah worked with textiles, and each time we encountered these works, it felt like a hug. Isn't clothing a form of hugging? In Qasimiya, the school's central grounds are embraced by recycled cotton bedsheets, pillowcases, burial cloth and other fabrics — including silk and chiffon — by Emirati artist Hashel al-Lamki. One hanging cloth even had some questions for us: Were you the reason behind someone's tears? Were you the cause of an animal's distress? Did you torture a plant and forget to give it water? The work's statement claims to summon wisdom. Its presence amid classrooms housing different artworks evokes the kind of knowledge weaving that once threaded through schools. In Dhaid, a more distant oasis in Sharjah, the biennial extended into a palace, an old clinic, and a farm — spaces where the artworks seemed to take up more room. We walked into a formidable pool-like architectural installation and recognized Mahmoud Khaled, a compatriot and member of our community in Egypt. In Pool of Perspective – 2030 (2025), he stages a voided future as a site of malfunction, referencing the mega-national construction projects back home, laden with the promise of futurity. This illusory future is embedded in the structure through various forms of optical play. We also found Wael Shawky's I am Hymns of the New Temples (2023) and enjoyed a fragment of his theatrical production crafted through tableaus that fantasize the real. The work belongs to a similar repertoire of films Shawky makes, using similar form to stage a different protagonist: In this case, it's the story of the ruins of Pompeii. On our way out, we stopped at the farm in Dhaid, where musicians and sound artists composed with trees, waterways and other lifeforms in the deserted oasis. Among them were Joe Namy — whose main work Dub Plant, tracing connections between radio and agriculture, we sadly missed — Başak Günak, Sandy Chamoun, Hauptmeier|Recker, Berke Can Özcan and Sary Moussa. It was magical. Many of the works predictably engaged with ecological questions, especially around resources. Italian Libyan artist Adelita Husney-Bey uses art and pedagogy to think with water about scarcity, famine and colonialism. Brazilian artist Luana Vitra imagines attraction and desire between minerals as a refusal of extraction for profit. Filipina-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang takes us to the curious worlds of pearl diving and industrialization in the Arabian Gulf, the Philippines and China. From the Gulf, most of the art deals with similar questions. Saudi artist Ayman Zedani spotlights an ancient fungi, recovered in Saudi Arabia, in an experimental film about its violent extraction — an echo of the oil industry. Kuwaiti artist Monira al-Qadiri presents an oil refinery that shimmers as both metropolis and sci-fi city. Bahraini artist Mariam Alnoaimi collaborates with fishermen and biologists to explore the Gulf's waters not as sites of trade and transfer, but as lived environments. An unconventional work in this Gulf tapestry is Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah, who turns more directly to the everyday. Her You Ask, We Answer (2024) — a massive canvas sprawling across several rooms — brims with images, paintings, and collage. It's playful, ceaseless, whimsical and doesn't care to exceed its own aesthetic momentum. On the short drive back to Ajman — just 15 minutes, though it often feels like crossing into another world — we tried to recall what stayed with us. The smallest of the seven emirates, Ajman hasn't caught up with the global integration spree that animates the UAE's vision. It's a rougher edged, laid-back space, where labor is visible and contemporary art is absent. In a reading group on Aesthetic Theory, we learned that art must turn against itself. That line returned to us as we revised the show into memory. We imagined fugitive artworks following us into Ajman. This is probably the art that turns against itself.
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Rawabet Art Space presents a series of three different short stories in the play 'El-Wadaa' El-Akhir' on Wednesday, the 23rd of April, and Thursday, the 24th, at Rawabet Art Space.
