Coinciding with the finissage of the Sharjah Biennial 16, this dialog brings in dialogue its 5 curators, Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell, who mirror on the collective strategy of elaboration, creation, and sisterhood they’ve shared earlier than and in the course of the biennale, carried out in instances of rage, and but, tenderness and creativeness.
BARBARA CASAVECCHIA
Thanks for being right here, all of you. I wish to begin from the title you selected for the biennial, to hold:
to hold a house
to hold a historical past
to hold a commerce
to hold a wound
to hold equatorial warmth
to hold resistance
to hold a library of redacted paperwork
to hold rupture
to hold Te Pō [the beginnings]
to hold change
to hold songs
to hold on
to hold land
to hold the language of the interior soul
to hold new formations
to hold the embrace of a river present
to hold sisterhood and communal connection
to hold the rays of a morning with out concern1
It’s a verb, and this brings with it an motion, a motion. Ursula Le Guin’s “service bag idea of fiction” instantly resonates as a reference, to me. Was this concept of being in a course of, and particularly in a strategy of bringing ahead, a part of your reasoning? How did all of it begin?
NATASHA GINWALA
As you’ve mentioned, that’s how the title referred to as out to you. And I feel everybody who visits has their very own pre-image. It’s nice when a biennial seduces you, and builds a relationality. Within the early phases of our course of, Megan addressed the duty of the visitor and the host additionally when it comes to the artists we might usher in, who would come to Sharjah—typically for the primary time—with their very own embodied histories and types of reminiscence holding. This immediate “to hold” unleashes a number of threads from embodied journeys and experiential territories which are hosted and develop into full of life ensembles, by particular person artists and several other collectives. A framework relatively than a theme—we began with this query of what it entails to hold a house, ancestors, and political formations with you. It distilled and cross-fertilized from there, opening up into our extra propositional/poetic manifesto.
AMAL KHALAF
That course of was one of many many refractions of how we’ve been speaking with each other. Distilling that verb, as Natasha says, after which constructing collectively a poetic manifesto, was like an invite to all of us. And to the artists as nicely, who have been making the works, as a result of it began so as to add a special shade to how that they had thought of it. The verb was actually necessary with a purpose to mirror this fixed motion and alter, which isn’t nearly reactivity to the horrors of the now, the previous, and the longer term, however relatively the concept of being in flux.
ZEYNEP ÖZ
Each certainly one of us and our respective tasks match into that query. To reply it, I might say it took an extended, very long time, but additionally a really brief time. Since we had been revolving round this interrogation perpetually, after we lastly needed to provide you with a title, it was nearly instinctive. Natasha and Amal already talked about why it was necessary to make use of a verb. However we additionally talked about how making lists is a political act, a method of holding monitor, saying issues over and over, and highlighting them. We felt that that motion of producing various things, actions, and potentialities is one thing all of us share.
MEGAN TAMATI-QUENNELL
I agree with all that has been mentioned. I felt just like the query was one thing I might inhabit, and it resonated strongly with the tasks I used to be creating for ihi, my part: the concept of carrying land, tradition, songs, data, historical past, notions of time, but additionally rupture, made sense with every certainly one of them. It did take ages to search out one thing beneath which our individually authored tasks might coalesce, nevertheless it was additionally, like Zeynep mentioned, very quick as soon as we settled on the query as an open-ended proposition, as a result of it had a collective resonance.
BARBARA
The carrying of various voices, as in storytelling, poetry, and rhythms dictated by the physique, are types of polyphony. Why did you wish to use particularly this language, as an alternative of constructing a extra theoretical curatorial framework?
NATASHA
This biennial course of actually did start with pondering from the intestine, conveying a lexicon of emotion, lived concepts, and practices that matter to us proper now. I feel it has lots to do with being sincere with ourselves and with each other in a second when most of the most important establishments in our societies are failing us. Somewhat than getting into a selected family tree of thought or political formation, we instilled completely different modes of reception and schemes of cohabitation for the artistic voices being invited to take part. The priority has been to broadcast resonances from life-making, narrating from plural ontologies, and strategies of doing which are located, and never abstractions.
For a few of us, as cultural organizers who keep interdependent smaller-scale institutions, precarity and every day vulnerability are components of the artistic course of. So it’s valuable to work on a biennial which you can actually use as a resonance chamber, a testing floor, and a spot of gathering with wide-spanning infrastructure. It was essential for me to wrestle with how South Asian historic expertise and social realities play a job on this version, whereas on the identical time, the continued wars level to rising urgencies that traverse past aesthetic solidarity. Somewhat than leaning into a selected line of thought, there have been grounded dialogues, learnings by my travels within the Indian Ocean context, and an array of fabric intelligences that got here collectively to form the biennial step-by-step.
MEGAN
I did work primarily with a First Nations positionality in relation to position, and that concept of embodying the that means of “to hold” grew to become a basic component of my venture, as Natasha was saying. ihi did ask the query of what it’s, or may be, to be a visitor in another person’s land, nation, or context. To contemplate what it means to be a customer, who doesn’t essentially have deep connections and historical past with, or data of, a locale, and what your tasks are as a visitor. In First Nations cultures, there may be what we might name tikanga, which implies protocols or practices for being a visitor in another person’s land/tradition/nation, so I labored with that, if tangentially.
Inside that, I additionally needed to make sure that the artists I used to be working with had the chance to carry their uncompromised entire selves, concepts, practices, and histories to Sharjah. I needed these artists and people works—deeply engaged in their very own contexts and occupying a located place of their respective cultures—to really feel supported, and seen, and browse, on this a part of the world. How, for instance, might I carry photographs talking of ancestral landscapes in Hawaii, like these photographed by Kapulani Landgraf? I wanted to consider what the synergies or cross-cultural connections have been between Hawaii and his expertise and right here. That’s the place I got here from. My providing was poetic, and never all the pieces was decoded. I did attempt to maintain the integrity of every work intact.
AMAL
I like the concept of the choir. Language and data, and I might say ladies’s data, are sometimes the results of an embodied transmission. Whether or not we’re speaking about technological change, politics, or sacred practices with earth and water, I really feel like there’s a kind of language that we needed to privilege, and we imagine that artists have the very best applied sciences to transmit it to audiences. It was actually necessary to carry into our course of the broader umbrella of language, and there have been so many processes within the making of the works on view, so many gatherings, and collective moments, and mini-choirs—actually and in any other case. Alia has a number of wonderful tales to share.
ALIA SWASTIKA
I actually agree with Amal’s reflections on how we tried to make use of a special vocabulary. I’m rethinking additionally how language represents a group, and the way we will carry its many voices. My course of in getting ready the biennial tried to mix the working collectively of up to date artists and completely different Indigenous communities. So, for instance, I went to some islands and villages in distant areas of Indonesia, and as an alternative of asking the artists to create one thing from their investigations or their researches there, we wished to provide the stage to individuals who had by no means beforehand been acknowledged as artists or activists. For me, that notion of illustration and the transformations of language from one context to a different, the very numerous methods of talking, have been additionally an event for reflecting alone curatorial follow. There have been very wealthy conversations between the communities themselves, the artists working with them, the activists, myself as curator and all of the visitor curators I’ve invited to work with me, and writers, and filmmakers. I’ve actually loved orchestrating all these completely different languages.
Amal emphasised additionally how we tried to provide more room to ladies’s knowledges. Within the case of Southeast Asia, as an example, many of those practices are nonetheless a part of on a regular basis life. Persons are making issues which have at all times been seen as craft, and by no means actually as sources of information, however now there’s a motion within the artistic trade towards that kind of labor. I feel the pandemic deeply modified the methods individuals take a look at the villagers and the Indigenous communities, making an attempt to study from their resilience, and why their connections between people and the cosmological order might assist us higher perceive the world.
BARBARA
Biennials have their very own histories, genealogies, and chronologies as locations for experimenting and rethinking establishments. Was there any instance that was particularly inspiring to you, or one thing you actually didn’t wish to reproduce? It’s at all times fascinating how data is carried from one place to a different. And what’s to be discovered and gathered from numerous instances and generations.
NATASHA
I imagine we didn’t wish to reproduce an arc of institutional critique, however there have been issues that got here from the instructions we’ve taken—like residencies, completely different types of gathering with a purpose to facilitate the creation of works, hybrid publishing codecs, producing vinyl data, turning the venues into environments for efficiency and recitals, and methods of sewing collectively these dynamic tangents of creating. Somewhat than succumbing to the logic of white dice configurations, I used to be guided by the openness of courtyards, the inherent porosity within the heritage websites, and areas of listening, resting, and sounding throughout the biennial—resisting the museological to render types of show that welcome the physique searching for pleasure and inquiry.
ZEYNEP
None of us had labored collectively earlier than, and all of us come from completely different curatorial backgrounds. I feel {our relationships} to Sharjah are numerous, and {our relationships} to completely different institutional fashions are likewise numerous. I’ve discovered lots from the methods wherein everybody has operated, and vice versa. I really feel that the explanation it labored is as a result of we had particular person tasks to comply with, however we additionally had front-row seats to 1 one other’s processes, in addition to an incredible useful resource “library” within the different 4. Sharjah may be very particular in permitting for numerous codecs to happen on the identical time. Not numerous biennials try this. A few of us had longer commissioning processes, a few of us labored site-responsively, and so forth, and we every experimented in our personal methods.
If there’s one factor I would point out as a precedent to this biennial, it’s that, for me, Sharjah has been an necessary place for experimentation and for rising communities. In sensible phrases, for me it was wonderful to have the ability to tinker with the format of each the 13 YAZ Publications and the spatial exhibitions, and to attempt to oscillate between these two codecs, throughout each analysis and manufacturing. Akira Ikezoe talks about nuclear power within the animation and the work we commissioned from him, however then there may be additionally the biologist Sophia Tintori, at work on monitoring down worms in Chernobyl, discussing her expertise whereas driving round for her lab analysis. Likewise, there have been works from Luana Vitra and Ayman Zedani about mining and power sources of their respective geographies of Brazil and Saudi Arabia. There was Off the Grid, a publication devoted to Onur Ceritoğlu, whose work investigates power conversion in an off-grid group searching for sustainability.
AMAL
Has anyone but talked about the phrase “belief”? As a result of I feel that’s a given in any collective course of. We deeply felt that belief, each mutually and from the Sharjah Artwork Basis, with a relentless feeling of chance that, for me, saved this complete train thrilling. I had not labored on a biennial earlier than. I normally work with artists on tasks which are, let’s say, three to eight years lengthy. My timescales are so prolonged, and a biennial feels so brief, however I nonetheless needed to activate and stretch the potential for belief. If there was something I needed to check, it was how a lot we might carry that intimacy—that’s the correct phrase, to me—within the relation with the artists, with each other, with an establishment.
MEGAN
Like Amal, this was my first biennial. It has been a terrific alternative that I’m extraordinarily grateful for—a chance to increase myself curatorially and to work globally, which I cherished. And it was vital to take action alongside these ladies, my international contemporaries, every famend for his or her work and curatorial follow and able to carry to the desk their mind, positioning, and sensibilities, in addition to the networks of artists and communities they symbolize and work inside. It was an unequaled alternative to platform artists from my a part of the world. There was an amazing quantity of belief from the inspiration and its president and director, Hoor Al-Qasimi, that enabled us to curate the reveals.
For example, I invited the extraordinary artist Saffronn Te Ratana, who doesn’t normally take part within the artwork world, as a result of it leaves her chilly. She helped construct Te Rau Karamu, a marae (assembly home), which was a communal venture in Wellington that has received numerous awards for its design, artwork, and structure. For her, that was the top, and she or he thought that all the pieces else could be self-importance. However she agreed to take part on this biennial due to our mutual connection and belief relationship, and in addition as a result of with the ability to current her work in a largely non-Western context and interact with the individuals and cultures right here was actually necessary to her. I’m so privileged to have her within the present. Her work carries Māori data to the Gulf. Additionally Raven Chacon’s sound work at Al Madam, associated to his personal historical past in addition to the historical past of the UAE and what he referred to as “compelled placement,” once more carried data and understanding of a scenario that occurred each right here and in his personal nation, cultural context, and surroundings.
ALIA
I’d like to attach with my expertise of being, along with Hoor, a part of the Worldwide Biennial Affiliation. This implies I’m fairly engaged with the biennial world, particularly different biennials in Asia. Twenty or possibly thirty years in the past, the essential thought of a world biennial was to usher in worldwide artists and ask them to make massive tasks with out actually excited about construct sustainable relationships or conversations with the local people. Over the past ten years, issues have been altering lots, along with the concept of decolonizing biennials as a brand new method of training internationalism. I don’t wish to name it a pattern, however let’s say it’s a brand new path. Now, a great name for a biennial is the way you interpret and dig into the narratives and the historical past of 1 particular locality, whereas on the identical time opening it to wider conversations with worldwide artists and audiences.
NATASHA
Earlier than this, I had by no means seen so many alternative modes of exhibition making being examined out in such selection inside one biennial. The multiplicity of venues helps, after all, and I’d like to increase respect to Hoor and the entire basis crew for the methods wherein they’ve created architectures for staging a serious exhibition, which have lots to do with conservation and restoration as durational establishment constructing, in addition to prioritizing circulation to the broader cultural heritage and sources in Sharjah for its working communities.
I used to be fascinated by the heritage homes, particularly Bait Al Serkal, which is a former hospital the place artists Rajni Perera, Naeem Mohaiemen, Sky Hopinka, Pallavi Paul, and Fazal Rizvi responded to constructed options, corresponding to indoor water wells, whereas addressing themes corresponding to care work, demise, grief, loss, or the transmission of ancestral data from one life state to a different. On the identical time, the white-cube areas round Al Mureijah permitted me to introduce pioneering but missed creative figures corresponding to Bangladeshi modernist SM Sultan and VISWANADHAN, a painter and experimental filmmaker in his eighties who left Kerala in 1968 and has been residing in Paris since. There’s a big demographic of Kerala residents employed within the UAE, and whilst a part of the Sharjah Artwork Basis crew. But it isn’t typically that cult artists from Kerala get celebrated in exhibitions and biennials. Including a big chapter of VISWANADHAN’s oeuvre to this version was a step on this path.
BARBARA
One of many many traces of your manifesto reads: “to hold room for tenderness and rage.” We’re inhabiting a second of unbelievable rage, tenderness, and grief, which we’re experiencing in endlessly alternative ways. Why did you spotlight this mixture as particularly significant.?
ALIA
I used to be the one who proposed to make use of the time period “tender.” I felt it was necessary, whereas working along with my great colleagues right here, and the individuals within the basis, and all these artists, to generate a great power for individuals to hold one another. In a method, we have been additionally pondering of our relationship with wider contexts, like ecological and environmental knowledges. I used to be reflecting on how we might create tender conversations, concentrate, and simply be there for each other. Now we have to hear, too, and that’s why we launched a number of poetry and songs, as a result of the follow of listening, radical listening, can kind solidarity and togetherness. A phrase like “tender” may help us query our methods of residing, or connecting to one another. It’s all about how we wish to look and construct the world collectively once more.
AMAL
Talking of rage, I feel it lives within the ideas of grief and lament, which have been very current in so many conversations. Rage comes additionally from some questions every of us have, as artwork staff, as cultural staff, as individuals. I’ve been pondering lots about the place these feelings are expressed in exhibition areas. Are they actually allowed to be held, and to be felt? In each biennial and museum, there are works embodying and speaking such feelings, however in what method can we obtain them? It’s one thing we’ve been trying to carry, and carry: to be tender, to be enraged, and to be grieving. It’s been fascinating, within the editorial course of, not water down these feelings. How artists might participate on this composting course of, to take this violence and take into consideration how it’s scarring us every day, but additionally think about a extra life-affirming world within the midst of this necropolis that appears to get greater daily. Hopefully, on this biennial, there’s area for these feelings to be current and for audiences to share them.
ZEYNEP
Personally, I don’t wish to ignore grief, however I additionally wish to be hopeful. I considered fiction and science fiction, particularly, as generative automobiles. This concept of making, imagining, pondering, and being hopeful, to me is at all times vital. I want to see what persons are capable of generate. There’s a second for grieving, sure, however there’s additionally a second for imagining. And creating an area for doing that’s so necessary.
Numerous the artists and contributors that I labored with have been excited about financial collapse in a time like this, the place there are accelerated technological adjustments, and what meaning when it comes to mobility, displacement, and dispersing of communities. Quite a bit has to do with what you permit behind, the trash or waste that we’re embedded in, the recollections that get flooded. Artists like Raafat Majzoub, Fatma Belkıs, or Liu Chuang communicate on to this type of shifting of communities and supplies.
There may also be a certain quantity of doomsday-ing in all of this, and I feel it’s necessary to provide issues a perspective with historical past. There have been many moments of accelerated change, and someway, on the opposite aspect, there are tales to be cherished, so I needed to focus on that, to consider doable situations of aid and building. And I feel there may be numerous traditionally knowledgeable reimagining in these tasks.
MEGAN
I suppose I’m near Zeynep, in a method. Numerous the artists I invited, as First Nations, are coping with colonization and talk about that of their work, immediately or obliquely. There may be each deep rage and deep grief on the inequities of conditions. There are traumas which were carried generationally, and situations which were compelled upon individuals. They’ve inherited violence and violent practices designed to extinguish Indigenous individuals, their cultures and methods of being. So, many reply to the impacts of that, and to the colonial onslaught that’s ongoing.
However I didn’t wish to be solely in grievance mode. I additionally needed to point out creativeness, aspiration, innovation, resilience, resistance, response, and I suppose survival and alter. Even the concept of lament, to me, speaks of our methods of navigating grief, however isn’t just about trauma and loss; it’s a human situation that may be expressed within the summary, poignantly and poetically. ihi is a Māori idea associated to a bodily relatively than a religious energy. It instructions awe and respect, and it’s actually a few transcendent energy—energy with or inside.
There are works like Luke Willis Thompson’s video Whakamoemoeā (2025), which imagines a constitutional change in Aotearoa. It charts 2 hundred years of Māori battle for tino rangatiratanga, or Māori sovereignty—Māori resistance and resilience—but additionally a method ahead. It’s primarily based within the yr 2040 and offered as an imaginary state broadcast a few latest constitutional change at Matariki, the Māori new yr, shifting from a colonial Westminster-style governance to an Indigenous plurinational state. What may that carry? What could be the affect of adopting that type of governance? Wouldn’t it be of profit to all, or simply to First Nations individuals? What would the affect be internationally? These questions are for all of us.
Sharjah Biennial 16
till June 15, 2025
Natasha Ginwala is a curator, author, and researcher at the moment primarily based in Sri Lanka and serving as creative director of Colomboscope (2019–ongoing). She additionally lately held the function of affiliate curator at massive at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018–24) and creative director of the thirteenth Gwangju Biennale (2021) with Defne Ayas. Ginwala has been a part of creative and curatorial groups for Contour Biennale 8 (2017); documenta 14 (2017); Berlin Biennale 8 (2014); and the eighth Taipei Biennial (2012). She has co-curated worldwide exhibitions at e-flux; Sharjah Artwork Basis; Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, ifa Gallery, Berlin; KW Institute for Up to date Artwork, Berlin; L’appartement 22, Rabat, Morocco; Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Poland; the Museum of Up to date Artwork Chicago; the 56th Venice Biennale; SAVVY Up to date, Berlin; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape City. Ginwala is a extensively revealed writer with a concentrate on modern artwork, visible tradition, and social justice.
Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist, in addition to the director at Cubitt, London, and curator at massive at Serpentine Galleries, London (each 2019–current). In her present function, she has formed the civic program and commissioned greater than fifty long-term collaborative tasks, movies, and moving-image works. She can also be co-curating Ghost 2568, Bangkok (2025). Beforehand, Khalaf served as civic curator on the Serpentine Galleries, London (2009–23). She has developed residencies, exhibitions, and collaborative analysis tasks on the intersection of arts and social justice. Her tasks embrace the Edgware Highway Venture and Centre for Doable Research (2009–13); Radio Ballads (2019–22); and Sensing the Planet (2021). She curated the Bahrain Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and codirected the World Artwork Discussion board at Artwork Dubai (2016). She is a trustee of Mophradat, Athens, and never/nowhere, London, and a founding member of the GCC artwork collective.
Zeynep Öz is a curator and author. She was a cofounder and director of the Produce (I, II, III) collection (2011–17), commissioning greater than thirty tasks. She has edited and revealed quite a few publications throughout the scope of the Produce collection in addition to the thirteenth and sixteenth Sharjah Biennials. She has curated or co-curated Abou Farid’s Warfare of Omar Mismar for st_age/TBA21 (2021); the BACA Award exhibition of Marwan Rechmaoui’s work on the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands, which traveled to the Sharjah Artwork Basis (2019); the Turkish Pavilion on the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); the Sharjah Biennial 13 Istanbul off-site venture Bahar (2017); the Aichi Triennale 3, Japan (2016); Biggest Widespread Issue, SALT, Istanbul (2016); Plastic Veins, Residence Works VI, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013); and Promoting Snails within the Muslim Neighborhood, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013). Öz taught at Boğaziçi College (2015–20) and served on the curricular and choice committees of the Residence Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut.
Alia Swastika is a curator, researcher, and author from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, whose follow during the last ten years has addressed points and views of decoloniality and feminism. Her tasks contain decentralizing artwork, rewriting artwork historical past, and inspiring native activism. She is the director of the Biennale Jogja Basis, Yogyakarta, and continues her analysis on Indonesian ladies artists throughout Indonesia’s New Order (she revealed a ebook on this matter in 2019). She established and served as program director for Ark Galerie, Yogyakarta (2007–17), and was co-curator for the Biennale Jogja XI Equator #1 (2011); co-artistic director of the ninth Gwangju Biennale (2012); and roundtable curator for modern artwork exhibitions for the Europalia Arts Pageant (2017), together with displays at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium; and SMAK, Ghent, Belgium.
Megan Tamati-Quennell was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, and is now a curator, author, and researcher with a concentrate on trendy and modern Māori and Indigenous artwork. Her thirty-five years of curatorial expertise have included positions at three New Zealand establishments: the Nationwide Artwork Gallery and Te Papa, each in Wellington, and Govett Brewster Artwork Gallery and Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth. In 2024 Tamati-Quennell acquired a Companion of New Zealand Order of Benefit – CNZM for her contribution to Māori and First Nations artwork. She is at the moment a PhD candidate at Monash College in Melbourne, Australia. Her analysis pursuits embrace modern Māori artwork, Māori modernism, Māori ladies artists from 1930 to immediately, worldwide First Nations and non-Western artwork in transnational contexts, and First Nations artwork curatorial praxis. Tamati-Quennell is of Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāi Tahu, and Kāti Māmoe Māori descent.
