As a city, Sharjah is a rich metropolis that holds the customs of Emirati culture with the ambition of cosmopolitanism, its migrant workers commanding the streets and heightening a state of transience, optimism and survival. In reflecting this, the Sharjah Biennial 16 theme, ‘to carry’, unfolds as a layered, open-ended proposal guided by five culturally diverse female curators: Alia Swastika (Yogyakarta), Amal Khalaf (London), Megan Tamati-Quennell (Aotearoa New Zealand), Natasha Ginwala (Colombo, Berlin) and Zeynep Öz (Istanbul and New York).
Together these internationally celebrated curators draw on hybridised methodologies, embodied knowledges and kinship systems to present art as widely discursive as writing and deep listening, public congregations, workshops and song. Supported by Sharjah Art Foundation’s Director Sheika Hoor Al Qasimi, they continue the global project of dismantling Western curatorship models and pushing the boundaries of exhibition making — something Australian audiences will be expecting in Al Qasimi’s 2026 Biennale of Sydney.
Within such broad geographical and socio-political intentions, the current biennial omits the usual heavy weight ‘art celebrities’, exhibiting only a handful of Western artists and engaging almost exclusively with the global south. A cultivated investigation into emerging art, community-based organisers, composers and publishers underscores this expansive series of exhibitions, reiterating an increasingly unified intention to destabilise the epicentres of artistic practice, and in some cases, speak directly to the atrocities of current genocides around the world. However, there were omissions across venues—gender politics, queer theory, disability—are all quiet absences from the biennial. If more prevalent, these voices could have brought rich and nuanced conversation to this iteration particularly after such active representation across the 2024 Venice Biennale.
The Bait Al Serkal (Sharjah’s first hospital, built in the nineteenth century) was one venue where an excessive amount of objects overshadowed the decolonising intent. Tiny rooms across three levels filled with cultural objects, archival documentation, and contemporary art created a ‘walk-in Wunderkammer’ from room to room. Some artists (M’barek Bouhchichi, Fazal Rizvi) attempt to decolonise language, the archive and the artefact, however in this particular setting the works were almost re-exoticised. Another example was The Singing Wells' listening room, which was installed in a poorly lit room with a number of musical instruments placed in every nook, with cushions and texts on the floor, and ambient sound from the collective filling the room. This overuse of cultural objects standing in for important living communities unfortunately underwhelms a presentation that should be animated and celebratory; rather, it negates a lively encounter with the Nairobi collective’s rich practice.
Across multiple venues, the biennial included solo exhibitions within exhibitions (of note were Indian painter Viswanadhan at Sharjah Foundation and choreographer Chandralekha at Al Qasimiyah School). In the distant location of an abandoned health clinic in Al Dhaid and its neighbouring Arts Palace, Zeynep Öz’s curatorial contribution examined future technologies and their relationship to colonisation, labour relations and urbanism. Standouts included the kinetic sculptures of Fernando Palma Rodriguez marrying soil, aluminium, motors and sculpture to pay homage to agricultural techniques of Mexico as well as retelling mythological ideas and reconnecting with the cosmological underworld. Wael Shawky’s I Am Hymns of the New Temples (2023), shot in the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, symbolically brought together death and rebirth. Through a mythical staging of puppets (both man and animal), Shawky presented a world that is in a cyclical battle with itself while surviving natural calamities. The film aligns with Öz’s curation, bridging concepts of advanced technological and environmental exchange with extraction to beautiful affect.
On a related theme, Alia Farid’s film Chibayish (2023) explores the extractive industries in communities in southern Iraq and how it impacts those who live by the Ahwar (Iraqi wetlands). Farid’s extensive stay with these communities, interviewing its next generation, gives form to a startling work that explores the interdependent relationships between land and animal, community resistance and cultural identity. The footage of young adults (a demographic not truly represented in contemporary art) singing and dancing in their makeshift homes is startlingly hypnotic
In Al Hamriyah Studios, the pairing of Yvonne Koolmatrie (Ngarrindjeri) and Brian Martin (Bundjalung, Kamilaroi, Muruwari) is visually stimulating, with Koolmatrie’s eel trap weavings suspended mid-air, framing Martin’s large drawings of ancient trees. In a small cordoned-off room in Al Mureijah Square, two photographs by Raven Chacon—Mariano Lake and Chilchinbeto (both 2025)—that focus on abandoned Navajo nation estates, are paired with a sound installation by musicians Mara TK from Aotearoa New Zealand and Palestinian Rana Hamida who reimagine the rallying call ‘From the River to the Sea’. The interconnected stories of refuge, displacement and solidarity between colonised First Nations peoples deliver an evocative, emotionally powerful display.
Zadie Xa, recent Turner Prize nominee, brings together sculpture, sound and large scale intensive three-dimensional paintings into a dizzying, immersive space. Inspired by seashell wind chimes and Korean shamanic ceremonial rattles, Xa’s capacious installation emits a soundscape comprising folklore, confessions and audio elements from nature. Through an ancestral echo, Xa communicates familial legacies and kinship with the non-human world.
In summary, Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry is a multivocal provocation staged as contemporary art, retooling audiences with diverse resources to apprehend meaning. Ultimately, the biennial asks us to understand the precarities of site and to be more responsive to the cultures that have moulded and mended communities. By avoiding the canonical act of ‘upholding’ the status quo of an international biennial, this exhibition exudes the commitment of the curators to uplift their artists while highlighting the bridges of temporalities shared between cultures, customs and imagined futures.