A performance reviving Gulf women’s sea songs and an art intervention in a 1970s cinema will feature in the opening programme for Sharjah Biennial 17, it has been announced.
Exhibition tours, performances and screenings will take place across Sharjah city, Al Dhaid, Kalba and Khor Fakkan from January 21 to 24. Sharjah Art Foundation has also confirmed that its annual March Meeting will return from March 19 to 21, with discussions and commissioned performances expanding on the biennial’s themes.
The 17th edition, titled What Remains, Sits Restive, will run from January 21 to June 13, bringing together more than 100 artists across 11 venues in the emirate. Curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento, it explores how unresolved histories and past political ambitions continue to shape the present.
Among the opening highlights, Cynthia Zaven’s performance will revisit a lost tradition of women’s sea songs in the Gulf. The songs include expressions of collective grief and others affirming the roles of women who remained behind while the men went to sea.
Angela Ferreira’s intervention in a cinema dating from the 1970s will examine how architecture travels between places, drawing together histories and aesthetics shaped by colonialism and its aftermath.
Sound also runs through several other works in the programme. Christian Salablanca Diaz will present an assemblage of sound-generating sculptures rooted in memories of boat trips with his father through the Sierpe mangrove forest on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. Jessica Ekomane and Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape will each stage sound performances within Sharjah’s varied landscapes.
The opening programme will conclude with Present Uneven, a selection of video works curated by Harutyunyan and Tevz Logar. The films explore how earlier aspirations and political visions survive, change and re-emerge.
Venues in Sharjah city include Al Mureijah Square, Arts Square, Calligraphy Square, the Photography Gallery, the Flying Saucer and Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation. The programme also extends to Al Dhaid Art Centre, Kalba Ice Factory, Khorfakkan Hall and Khorfakkan Cinema.
The biennial’s two curators will develop separate presentations under the shared theme. Harutyunyan’s section brings together 55 participants to consider the continuing influence of socialist modernity and anti-colonial struggles. Nascimento’s 54 participants will explore the relationship between infrastructure, place and memory, including the effects of cultural silencing and oppression.
The March Meeting, now in its 18th edition, will develop these discussions through a three-day programme that includes performances by biennial participants Victor Gama, Wendy Morris and Hassan Khan.
Gama’s solo multimedia work draws on the handwritten reflections of anthropologist Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho, combining them with southern African polyrhythms, electronic music and contemporary compositions. Morris will lead a procession towards the breakwater at dusk, singing a lament to the Arabian Gulf, while Khan will perform recent songs and hip-hop tracks responding to contemporary events.
Evening tours of the biennial will run throughout the March Meeting, with a free bus tour to Sharjah’s central and eastern regions on March 18. The foundation’s exhibitions are free and open to the public, and registration for the January opening programme is now open.
