Sharjah Biennial has long depended on collaboration. Exhibitions are typically formed through meaningful exchanges between artists and curators, artworks and buildings, international practices and the local histories of the emirate.
For its 17th staging, that principle begins with the curators themselves.
Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento had not worked together before they were invited to curate the biennial. Titled What remains, sits restive, the 2027 staging will run from January 21 to June 13, with 109 participants presenting work across Sharjah City, Al Dhaid, Khor Fakkan and Kalba.
The collaboration results in two distinct ways of thinking about art, history and place in conversation. Harutyunyan, who was born in Armenia, is a professor of contemporary art and theory at Berlin University of the Arts, with research interests spanning post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory.
Nascimento, an Angolan architect and independent curator based in Luanda, works across visual arts, urbanism, geopolitics and arts education. She also co-curated Angola’s pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
The duo began their work in Sharjah towards the end of last year, through site visits and early conversations about what the biennial could become.
“We did a first visit to the sites, including those of the previous biennial. I had been before, but she had not,” Nascimento says. “We started to engage in conversation and think about what it would mean to do a biennial in Sharjah, and what that means for a curator. What would we like to bring to it?”
The arrangement required trust, Nascimento adds, as the two curators were not arriving as an established duo with a shared method in place.
“It is also a risk from the biennial organisers to say: 'Let’s bring these people together and hopefully they will do something,'” she says. “It is more common for people who know each other, or who have collaborated before, to come together.
“But if we are open to really understanding other practices and colleagues, and engaging in conversation, it can be fantastic, as it has been in this case.”
Harutyunyan is curating her first biennial, and says the process required her to translate years of research into physical and spatial form.
Informed partly by Armenia, the former Soviet republic where she was born, her section focuses on the afterlives of 20th-century socialist and state-led modernisation: the buildings, public spaces and institutions they left behind, and the artists who work with those traces.
“It’s about asking: 'What happens to the shards, to their fragments?'” she says. “They are not gone. These projects are dead, but their fragments are there. So how do artists give shape and form to those fragments in the present?”
Nascimento, meanwhile, approaches the theme through infrastructure beyond roads, buildings and physical systems. Rather than asking artists only to place work inside Sharjah’s buildings, she says the aim is to let those sites affect what they make.
“I did not want to formulate an idea of working that is just based on the fact that artists will assess space or certain buildings in Sharjah,” Nascimento says.
“It is more than having just a straightforward response, or to say: 'This is a wind tower house and I want to bring something here.' It is also about going a little bit deeper.
“What really resonates? What from those contexts can contaminate their existing artistic practices, their ideas, or what they do? I like this idea of a two-way conversation between site and context.”
The two curatorial approaches will be tested most clearly through the biennial’s varied locations.
“In Sharjah City, you have an intense urban life. In Al Dhaid, it is a sort of haunted landscape in many ways, with the old abandoned women’s clinic and the Art Palace. Then you go to Khor Fakkan, and you have this pristine, beautiful, tranquil landscape that is very different from Sharjah City,” Harutyunyan says.
“Geography already determines a certain pace of movement, from the intensity of the city all the way to the east coast. So in terms of curation, I want to be specific to the quality of locations.”
Site visits, both in person and through video material from Sharjah Art Foundation’s extensive archive, have helped clarify where certain works may sit and how they may speak to one another.
“We conducted both curatorial site visits and visits together with artists, which I find especially productive because you are visiting Sharjah not on your own, but with a group of artists,” Harutyunyan says. “In dialogue with them, some ideas start becoming much clearer, or crystallising around locations and venues.”
Those meetings have also left room for new concepts to emerge. Sometimes the curators decide where a work should go. At other times, an artist arrives with one idea and leaves with another.
That openness runs through Sharjah Art Foundation’s history with the emirate's buildings. The Flying Saucer, a distinctive brutalist structure that opened in 1978, was acquired by the organisation in 2012, used as a venue in the 2015 biennial and reopened five years later as a permanent exhibition and community space.
“I particularly like that Sharjah Art Foundation is using the biennial as a trigger for almost a larger urban master plan,” Nascimento says.
“It touches on the preservation of certain types of historical buildings and activates the biennial in places that are not so central, and may be difficult to reach.
“It goes beyond the event, with its big art crowds and stars, to represent this longer-term commitment to the local public.”
