Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). While the previous edition offered a decolonial reading, the 16th edition offers this time “A Para-Cartographic Method”according to the expression of Hoor al-Qasimi. The founding president of the Sharjah Art Foundation has thus selected five commissioners whose expertise is completed on the geographical level: Oceania with Megan Tamati-Quennell, Southeast Asia with Alia Swastika, South Asia with Natasha Ginwala, the Arab world with Amal Khalaf, and finally the Turkish world with Zeynep Öz. However, this division is not rigid, and crosses appear between the 17 sites that welcome works of around 200 artists.
Under the title of “To Carry” (Porter), several works from this edition are distinguished by their political commitment and their formal originality. Among them are How Love Moves (2023), a video with a dissonant assembly of Pallavi Paul on the hateful drifts of Hindu Ethnationalism in contemporary India; Khawagaka (2024), an installation of the Indonesian Rully Shabara, who created from scratch, using artificial intelligence, the archives of a fictitious Aboriginal tribe, the “Wusa”; as well as Capital blow (2024), an installation of the Palestinian Sakiya collective, based in Ramallah, which built a version of the Capitol of Washington in the form of a chicken coop 10 m long and 5 m high!
But the most emblematic works of “To Carry” are those which resonate directly with the context of the United Arab Emirates, like those of Raven Chacon or Monira Al Qadiri. A WANDERING BREEZE (2025), Sound Installation of Chacon, highlights the failures of the Émienne authorities. The artist designed this work for the village of Al-Madam, located in the desert east of Sharjah, near the Omanaise border. Built in the 1970s as part of a modernization program, this ghost village, made up of a dozen dwellings and a mosque, has never been inhabited by the Bedouins, for which it was intended. Largely enhanced over the decades, due to an unsuitable location and poor orientation of the openings, the site embodies the incomprehension of the nomadic lifestyle by the authorities of the time. Raven Chacon has chosen to reintegrate there, not without irony, these rebellious natives through a soundtrack of their traditional songs, broadcast from one house to another. Housing thus become sound boxes for nomadic, intangible and insubordinate cultures, who came to haunt those who tried to sedentate them. This sensitivity to music and the fate of Arab populations is rooted in the artist’s singular profile: composer trained in classical music, he is also of Navajo Navajo origin. This installation also illustrates the increased importance given to sound and performance by the Biennale, with the first edition of “April Acts”, a series of conferences and concert-performance.
A conversation on gender transition
More unexpected, Gastromancer (2023, [voir ill.]), from the Kuwaitian artist Monira Al Qadiri, addresses the question of transidentity. Bathed in a pink light, the work features two gigantic murex, shellfish in red fiberglass, hanging face to face. We hear them converse on their own transition from gender to their voice to the male stamp, which comes out of their peristome. The installation evokes a phenomenon observed in these marine molluscs, which change sex under the effect of tributyletians, these toxic substances used to protect the hulls of cargoes, and capable of low doses to masculine females of certain aquatic species. The artist also establishes an explicit link with the queer novel The diesel From the Emirian Thani al-Suwaidi (1966-2020), from which extracts are read by two voices off. Published in Arabic in Beirut in 1994, this novel retraces the transition to adulthood of a non -binary character born in a village of Emirates. Never published in the author of the author’s lifetime, the book was authorized in January 2025, just before the opening of the Biennale. The voices are those of transgender men, recorded for the occasion. In this regard, it should be noted that in 2016 the Emirates legalized, under certain conditions, the surgery of sexual reassignment. However, the steps to obtain official recognition of the change of sex remain difficult, while homosexual reports and travesty remain heavily criminalized.
The Biennale thus aligns with the progressiveness of major international exhibitions, while remaining out of step with its immediate socio -political environment. The future will say if the “gastromancy” of Monira al Qadiri has been able to predict the future, and if art will contribute to greater inclusiveness within the Emirian society.
