At the 15th Sharjah Biennial, Artists Grapple with Meeting the Politics of This Moment

“Do you see how the past is inescapable?” asks Farah Al Qasimi in her new film Um Al Dhabab (Mother of Fog) (2023), which fittingly debuted in the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial, “Thinking Historically in the Present.” On view through June 11th and featuring more than 150 artists working in a wide variety of media, this year’s biennial addresses overarching themes of personal and canonical history-making with artists speaking to concerns shaped by their own local politics.

Conceived by Okwui Enwezor before his death in 2019, “Thinking Historically in the Present” is the celebrated curator’s final project. Though the biennial was ultimately curated by Sharjah Art Foundation president and director Hoor Al Qasimi, Enwezor’s presence is still felt, specifically in Carrie Mae Weems’s touching installation The In Between (2022–23). The work is made up of a collection of 100 books representing the breadth of Enwezor’s scholarly and curatorial contributions. Elsewhere, however, it’s a curatorial absence that lingers.

Though the biennial is bolstered by some particularly strong pieces, it wavers from too light of a curatorial hand that often leaves artworks and artists siloed from, rather than in conversation with, each other. Still, “Thinking Historically in the Present” is a remarkable feat and no small endeavor. A geographically sprawling biennial with venues along the coastlines of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, it largely manages to maintain thematic cohesion.

In Al Qasimi’s Um Al Dhabab (Mother of Fog), on view in Khorfakkan Art Centre near the eastern coast of the emirate of Sharjah, two young women endeavor to move a man’s remains before a hotel casino is built atop his burial site. The restless spirit, who died fighting against the British during the 1819 siege of Al Dhayah fort in what is now the United Arab Emirates, gives his blessing. He remarks, “It’s better than ending up in a museum,” alluding to the rife history of Western institutions filled with dehumanizing displays of conquest and plunder.

The colonial legacy of museums appears again, in another venue on the opposite coastline, in Isaac Julien’s mesmerizing five-channel video installation Once Again…(Statues Never Die) (2022). Quoting Martinican poet and political activist Aimé Césaire, a voiceover states that it would’ve been better if museums were never created, and the Global South was instead allowed “to live alongside [Europe], dynamic and prosperous, whole and unmutilated…rather than offering up scattered limbs, these dead limbs, duly labeled, for us to admire.”

Like Once Again… and Um Al Dhabab, the biennial’s strongest works are not only conceptually rich and formally enticing, but concerned with confronting violence without visually recreating it. A clear standout is Erkan Özgen’s short film Wonderland (2016), in which 13-year-old Syrian refugee Muhammed, who is hearing impaired, urgently and emotionally signs and gestures the atrocities he’s witnessed following the 2014 Islamic State attacks. Just under four minutes long, the work is nothing short of devastating.

Violence and the way that its horrors often cannot be articulated into words are also conveyed in Reena Saini Kallat’s abstract sound-sculptures. Chorus (2017), Chorus I (2015–19), and Chorus II (2015–19)—modeled after World War II pre-radar listening devices used to locate enemy aircrafts—invite viewers to step into their large-scale metal structures. Instead of sounds of war, we hear a disorienting cacophony of birdsong. The melodies come from the national birds of bordering countries with hostile histories or adversarial presents, including the Palestinian sunbird; Israel’s hoopoe; Mexico’s crested caracara; and the U.S.’s bald eagle. The soundscape of apartheid and displacement is abstracted into the cries of birds. A palpable tension remains all the same.

In one of the video works within Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s immersive, site-specific installation, titled Until we became fire and fire us (2023), are the words: “Where there is violence, there is always a trace.” For these artists, it is the enduring remnants that become fertile ground for excavation.

Still, there are instances in which the biennial would have benefitted from greater curatorial discernment. At times, it acts like an uncritical presentation of the varied ways artists have grappled with colonialism and state violence. This is particularly apparent in the eager reproduction of racialized violence and trauma in certain artists’ works.

Explicit depictions of police violence against Black people in the United Kingdom populate Kimathi Donkor’s paintings and drawings. Rendering the moment in time where the amount of drama and gruesome violence is at its peak, his works turn the 1985 shooting of Dorothy “Cherry” Groce (and her subsequent paralysis) and the 1987 murder of 23-year-old Clintron McCurbin via asphyxia into spectacles of Black death and trauma. With a 2022 revisiting of McCurbin’s death as a subject matter, recreating a composition comparable to the 1987 piece, Donkor’s work seems unconcerned with growing conversations, studies, and scholarship about the ineffectiveness of such explicit imagery of racial violence in eliciting empathy or understanding.

Not dissimilarly, Ángela Ponce’s series “Ayacucho” (2017–22) on the mourning and grief-stricken in the titular Peruvian city fails to reckon with the ethics of photography and photojournalism. In her images, Indigenous people openly cry on top of closed caskets and attempt to identify the remains of loved ones who were killed by Peruvian soldiers more than 30 years ago in the 1985 Accomarca massacre. Here, private and personal moments become offerings for voyeuristic consumption.

During a preview of the biennial, curator Al Qasimi said of Ponce’s section during the walkthrough, “Some of the images are a little bit sensitive…I find them a little bit disturbing but I thought it was really important to not hide or shy away from the reality of what was happening. Hence, I really wanted to include this series.” With more than 300 artworks grappling with interconnected issues in the biennial, we see some artists confront related themes with greater success than others.

By focusing on the perpetrators of violence, rather than the victims, for example, Felix Shumba and Gabriela Golder expose the gravity of past injustices without fetishizing suffering. Shumba’s larger-than-life-size charcoal drawings feature uniformed figures wearing gas masks. The works hauntingly reflect upon the use of chemical and biological warfare employed by the white minority-led Rhodesian government against African freedom fighters during the Rhodesian Bush War in what is now present-day Zimbabwe. Rendered with an abyss of black, Shumba’s authoritative figures loom over the exhibition space like reminders of the inhumane lengths to which oppressors will go.

Meanwhile, in Golder’s film Ojos rotos / Broken Eyes (2023), closely cropped footage from Hong Kong to Palestine of riot police repeating the gesture of loading and reloading teargas launchers flash across the screen. While similar video recordings circulated online typically have their lens aimed at the brutalized protestor, Golder instead emphasizes the militarized gesture of the transgressor. Ultimately, Golder and Shumba confront historical atrocities with rigor and care.

A similar unevenness also appears in considerations of the legacy of monuments. A recipient of one of the 30 commissions marking the 30th anniversary of the Sharjah Biennial, Yinka Shonibare CBE presents seven smaller-than-life-size fiberglass reproductions of public statues of British imperialists, including Queen Victoria and Sir Charles James Napier, painted in the historically loaded patterns of Dutch wax fabric. Dated 2022, the body of work leaves viewers longing for a less literal approach, especially in the wake of years of global, public reckoning with public monuments.

Hanni Kamaly and Rushdi Anwar seem to respond to the shortcomings in Shonibare’s sculptures with their more skilled and complex engagements. In Kamaly’s film HeadHandEye (2017–18), the contemporary defacement of statues—a symbolic gesture of the removal of an old order—is set against a larger context of literal corporeal violence—the severing of native heads and hands under colonialism.

The image of the assailed historical monument is echoed again in Anwar’s brass and steel sculpture The Kingdom of Dust Ruled by Stones (2023). However, the statue that stands in disrepair is not a reproduction representing a figure of racial or colonial violence. Rather it is a monument that was decimated by the Islamic State as part of its campaign of genocide and mass destruction of cultural heritage against the Yezidi people in northern Iraq. Rather than belabor ideas that already occupy public consciousness, both Anwar and Kamaly employ an inquisitive approach.

While the biennial’s missteps occur only occasionally, its moments of synchronicity are equally rare, yet revelatory. Jasbir Puar and Dima Srouji’s immersive and site-specific, multi-room installation Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots) (2023) reimagines the quotidian objects that populate the artists’ memories of the Second Intifada in Palestine. Items that may otherwise denote a sense of limitation or restriction, such as cans of tuna, become objects signifying acts of resistance during a major Palestinian uprising against Israel in the early 2000s.

On one wall, wallpapered with a repeated shrapnel motif that resembles lavender flowers, are eight framed letters written in cursive by Srouji’s father. One contains the words, “Many nights we would sleep under the stairwell, or actually not sleep under the stairwell.” In the biennial, when visitors come across a doorway with white stairs and a red space illuminated underneath, it feels like stumbling upon a secret, or, as written in one letter, “our sanctuary.”