Sharjah
International Biennial 6
|
Sharjah International Biennial 6
8 April – 8May 2003
Sharjah Art Museums and Expo Centre Sharjah
United Arab Emirates
Director: Hoor Al-Qasimi
Curator: Peter Lewis
Department of Culture and Information, Government of Sharjah, U.A.E.
Sharjah International Biennial 6, P.O. Box 19989, Sharjah, United Arab
Emirates
Tel: 00971 6 568 8222
Fax: 00971 6 568 5959
email: info@sharjahbiennial.com
http://www.sharjahbiennial.com
|
Sharjah International Biennial 6 will represent 117 artists from
25
countries, as a questioning of the relations that constitute the global
sphere of cultural agency. Curators Hoor Al Qasimi (UAE) and Peter Lewis
(
Goldsmiths College) have worked with a number of other international
curators including Britta Schmitz, (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin), to
select
works for the Biennial. The new Expo Centre will host, with the Sharjah
Museum of Art, works of installation, video and photography in a survey
of
contemporary practices, that have looked at the developments in the UAE
and Arab world (recent survey “5 / UAE” at Ludwig Forum for
International
Art, Aachen, and of the work of curators, artists and writers that have
come to prominence since “ Documenta XI,” such as
artist/theorists Tony
Chakar, Jalal Toufic and Bilal Kheibz). The curators have selected works
that articulate the multiple, yet general discourses between aesthetics
and politics in terms of both a diversification and co-inciding of
representations and insurgencies. In the generalised terms of the
postmodern / post-colonial conditions that are interrogated, also in
view
of recent 9/11 consequences, the Biennial aims to address this
aesthetic,
specifically at an urgent time now. The Biennial is showing the works in
dialogical contexts, as emerging between these dangerous slippages.
Opening simultaneoulsy at Sharjah Expo Centre, and at the Museums of
Art,
on April 8th it will run until 8 May; the event breaks the mould of
previous Biennials in representing alternative practices. More attention
is given to realising artists' projects. A retrospective of works by
Eduardo Chillida is organised in conjunction to the Biennial at the
Museum
by Dr. Dorothea van der Koelen. The catalogue comprises 630 pages, in
colour with also a short guide. It is written in Arabic and English and
has commissioned essays from writers from UAE, Lebanon, Europe, USA and
China. Prizes at $50,000. Guest Professor Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths
College) joins writer / artists Tony Chakar, Bilal Khbeiz and Jalal
Toufic
for the symposium on 9 / 10 /11 April "Changing Horizons: New Aesthetic
Practice” organised by UAE art critic Talal Moualla.
|
|
