Interacting with the artworks, artists and cultural practitioners at this year’s Sharjah Biennial 12, which opened last month, made me realise that the experience was special.
It reminded me of curator Eungie Joo’s statement that “Sharjah is a very special place that calls you back again and again”. Art enthusiasts will find that especially true during the next three months.
Rather than conforming to prescribed themes, works at the Sharjah Biennial 12 (SB12), are presented in conversation with each other. Challenging modes of participation and engagement, “The past the present, the possible” invites participants and the public to reflect upon the possibilities and ambitions of Sharjah, a city and emirate still in the process of imagining itself through education, culture, religion, heritage and science.
SB12 acknowledges the centrality of the present — respecting the past but rejecting nostalgia and the burden of history in favour of productive imaginings of the possible. These perspectives resonate with the ideas of philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his essay “The Right to the City” (1967), which inspired the exhibition’s title.
Beginning with March Meeting 2014: Come Together and continuing through March Meeting 2015 (May 11–15, 2015), SB12 has developed over two years of site visits, research trips and production.
In her opening remarks at the press conference following the inaugural of SB12, Shaikha Hoor Bint Sultan Al Qasimi, President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, while thanking the curator, artists and staff who had worked tirelessly over months to put up this “very thought-provoking” show, also acknowledged the fact that they have to compete at a global level in the crowded cultural calendar.
While taking in the visual spectacle, most of which are site-specific and produced for the spaces they are located in, she reminded viewers to consider the totality by taking in the spaces as well.
Location figures prominently in several new projects, from material elements, negotiations of space and time, and even methods of collaboration. “The works really floored me,” admitted Joo, curator of SB12, addressing the press conference, and highlighted the “atmosphere of trust and community between the artists and the staff without which those works would not have been possible”.
There are 51 artists from 25 countries, out of which 36 artists accepted the challenge to create new works for SB12.
She said these works seek engagement with youth, with history as well as the architecture and natural landscape of Sharjah and beyond, “with multiple layers of interventions in space”.
During a conversation she had with artists Michael Joo and Byron Kim about their new commissions for the upcoming Biennial, she recalled how the title “The past, the present, the possible” came about.
Earlier in the run-up to SB12, while discussing the title, she had explained that it does not reflect a theme, but rather an overall concept that links the works and the practices together. She also stressed how important it was for her as a curator to invite artists that she felt could take into account the place and environment in which they are presenting their work.
For Brooklyn-based Kim, “the paintings I had made about the sky in Brooklyn were very similar to the sky here.”
Michael Joo spoke enthusiastically about his visit to archaeological sites in Sharjah, walking and talking about geologic time, “It was amazing for me to go out to these sites that were 50 million years old.”
Both discussed the idea that even though artists in SB12 use a diversity of media and have different formal and conceptual approaches to art, there are similarities in the way they think and common threads that emerge from their work. Kim explains, “We can almost inevitably have some sort of conversation between us and among our work.”
SB12 spreads further into the city than previous editions of the Biennial, with Michael Joo’s new commission featured across Sharjah Creek in a warehouse at Port Khalid, and Hassan Khan’s intervention at The Flying Saucer, an iconic building built in the 1970s.
In Kalba, Adrián Villar Rojas’s massive intervention covers the entire site of the city’s old Ice Factory.
Installations by Mohammad Kazem and Mixrice are found within Souq Al Shanasiyah, and Abraham Cruzvillegas’s site-specific sculptures can be seen at the Bird and Animal Market.
The extensive SAF Art Spaces include new commissions by Abdullah Al Saadi, Iman Issa, Cinthia Marcelle, Taro Shinoda, Rayyane Tabet, Haegue Yang and other new commissions and works.
Gary Simmons’s “Across the Chalk Line”, takes the form of a cricket field for children and Eduardo Navarro’s “XYZ” is an original children’s activity that accentuates their mutual trust, concentration and collaboration, while Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 2015 (Eau de RRose of Damascus) transforms Calligraphers’ Studios into a rose garden, rosewater distillery, kitchen and lounge.
At the Sharjah Art Museum, works by Hassan Sharif include those created in 1985 at Sharjah’s Al Mareija Art Atelier funded in the 1980s in Al Mureijah, the area where SAF Art spaces now stand, and Byron Kim’s newly commissioned “City Night”.
Also on view in the Arts Area, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s mixed-media installation, “The Incidental Insurgents” at Bait Al Serkal and Mark Bradford’s “Untitled (Buoy)” on the façade of Bait Obaid Al Shamsi.
Across the various exhibition spaces are major presentations of historic works by senior artists including Etel Adnan, Chung Chang-Sup, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara and Fahrelnissa Zeid.
While primarily produced from the 1940s to 1990s, the works remain incredibly relevant today and together form the backbone of the Biennial. “These meditative works by senior artists give the feel of contemporaneity even now,” says Eungie Joo.
Focused approach
Young artist Rayyane Tabet, who lives and works in Lebanon, is showing two of his works at SB12 — one in the open square at the SAF Art spaces and another in the Sharjah Art Museum. Tabet, educated in Beirut and New York, is no stranger to the Sharjah Biennale. The last time he had participated, four years back, there were almost 100 artists. “This time it is half the number. It’s a more focused approach.”
His work here, “Cyprus”, 2015, commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, is the fourth work in a series, an exercise in recovering his earliest memories. Tabet started making sculptures that reimagine these objects and the situations that surround them.
“Cyprus” features a wooden boat that the artist’s father rented 29 years ago in a failed attempt to flee Lebanon with his family. The work began when Tabet and his family accidentally encounters the same boat, now decommissioned, on the shores of Jbeil in 2012. It is such opportune, even mystical, coincidences that recur in Tabet’s work. [Here, the 850kg boat hangs in precarious balance with its human-size anchor, underscoring its anthropomorphic qualities through both fragility and form.]
Tabet’s second sculpture at SB12 “Steel Rings”, (2013-) made of rolled engraved steel, consumes an entire wing of the Sharjah Art Museum. It alludes to the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Company (TAPLine) set up in 1946 to build and operate a 1,213-kilometre, 78-centimetre-diametre pipeline to transport oil from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon through Jordan and Syria, and after 1967, through the Golan Heights. The company was dissolved in 1983 and the pipeline abandoned and left hidden underneath the land.
“Steel Rings” represents the first 60 kilometres of the TAPLine — the only physical object that crosses the borders of five countries in a region very conscious of its demarcated boundaries — from its origin in Saudi Arabia.
Jawshing Arthur Liou, a Taiwanese artist, who lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana, United States, creates video installations that employ technology to transform representation and reality. “Kora, 2011-12”, highlights Liou’s 2,300-kilometre expedition from Lhasa through the Tibetan Plateau, ending at Mount Everest and Mount Kailash.
He undertook the journey after his four-and a-half –year -old daughter passed away. The work refers to the four-day “kora” — a walking circumambulation — around Mount Kailash at an elevation of between five and six-thousand metres. Liou, who was a journalist before taking to art, admits that it is his first outdoor work. Previously all his works were studio compositions.
He made preparations for four years involving field photography, fundraising and logistics planning before undertaking the journey to Mount Kailash. Although he was surrounded by religion, he never practised it until he found solace in Buddhism after his personal loss.
“Eungie saw my work in South Korea last year and invited me to SB12 because she felt the parallels and similarity of thought process between artists from the Middle East and my work, from a religious point of view,” Liou told Weekend Review.
The work retraces the steps of his search while presenting vast mountain landscapes, invoking a reverence for nature and space for spiritual reflection and sanctuary.
Tokyo-based artist Taro Shinoda’s “Karesansui” (2015) is a site-specific installation with wooden platform commissioned for SB12. It yokes Sharjah’s environment with Japanese tradition.
Shinoda was in Sharjah last May for a 10-day visit for the preliminary research. “They took me to the desert where the dynamic landscape as the wind blows, inspired me. With ‘Karesansui’, my attempt is how I can actually recreate this dynamic desert environment. I want to show some invisible things. I don’t like to explain too much. You should be able to put your story into this.”
“Respect ... silence ... you can meditate with yourself. Silence brings up your own ideas. I wanted to create a platform for such a kind of interaction,” Shinoda said.
American artist Gary Simmons’s “Across the Chalk Line”, 2015, is a site-specific installation commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Addressing the pastime of youths across Sharjah, the work is a public art project in the form of a junior-sized cricket oval designed for neighbourhood children. A quote from C.L.R. James’s 1963 book “Beyond a Boundary” demarcates the boundary line in four languages (Arabic, English, Malayalam and Urdu), asking “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” — which itself is inspired by a Rudyard Kipling poem.
“Across the Chalk Line” provides a playing field for children and invites viewers to cross the boundary into the realm of cricket to ponder not only the beauty of the game but also its social and political potential.
Emirati artist Mohammad Kazem’s practice is characterised by the use of reductive elements in repeating formats. The works at SB12, “Scratches on Paper” (2011-14), give insight into some of the ideas and techniques that have underpinned his work since the 1990s — especially his scratching technique.
These Braille-like marks suggest a delicate poetics of form, a visualisation of a composition as a fundamental and intuitive form of expression.
In the heritage house Bait Hassan Mukhtar, Danh Vo presents “Come to Where the Flavors Are” (2015), an installation based on two ongoing bodies of work that involve circuits of commerce, consumption and other more abstract forms of transmission.
“We the People” (2010-) is a full-scale reproduction of the Statue of Liberty fabricated near Shanghai in copper. The artist keeps the statue unassembled in sections that fit into shipping containers, allowing for tailored presentations of the more than 250 pieces. In Sharjah, Vo, who was born in Vietnam but lives and works in Mexico City, assembles the 13 parts that comprise the statue’s “armpit”, which towers nine metres high.
The installation also includes dozens of cardboard cartons used to ship Marlboro cigarettes and Lipton tea. Gold leaf has been applied to the logos, augmenting these discards and imbuing them with new value. “Come to Where the Flavors Are” is a play on the slogan from a well-known Marlboro commercial. The blend of tobacco, tea and Lady Liberty casts a new artistic allure on the viewers.
Brooklyn-based American artist Kim’s works, “Sunday Paintings”, (2001-) is from an ongoing series of modest square paintings of the sky, created by the artist every Sunday since 2001.
Kim paints a portrait of the sky each week, then inscribes a few momentary thoughts of the day, dating each panel with his location. The series emerged from his encounter with the work of Chuang Tze, a Taoist philosopher who wrote about the relationship of the infinite to the infinitesimal. “Sunday Paintings” embody a personal cosmology that contrasts the everyday against the everything.
Abdullah Al Saadi lives in Khor Fakkan and his “Al Zannoba Journey”, 2015, depicts the “changing relationship between nature and man”.
C. Unnikrishnan from Kerala, India, passed out from Thrissur Fine Arts last year, and his BFA presentation impressed the Kochi Biennale curator Jitish Kallat, making the artist the youngest participant there.
The 20-year-old’s work “Untitled” is an extension of that at Kochi — a freestanding wall composed of more than 300 painted and carved bricks, dissecting the space. The paintings and carvings on brick record intimate scenes of life in the city and anecdotes of his relations with people and objects.
N.P. Krishna Kumar is a freelance writer based in Dubai.
Sharjah Biennial is organised by the Sharjah Art Foundation, which brings a broad range of contemporary art and cultural programmes to the communities of Sharjah, the UAE and the region.
SB12 will be on view through June 5. For more information, visit www.sharjahart.org
