November 14, 2026–April 14, 2027
United Arab Emirates
The Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT)—the first major platform for architecture and urbanism in the Middle East, North and East Africa and Asia—announces the dates and full participant list for its third edition (SAT03), Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures, opening on November 14, 2026 and running until April 14, 2027.
Curated by Anthropologist-Curator Vyjayanthi Rao, with Associate Curator Tau Tavengwa, SAT03 brings together 32 participants whose practices span architecture, anthropology, urbanism, art, design, education and community initiatives. Through new installations, films, archives, workshops, performances and lectures, this multi-disciplinary edition explores how architecture can support collective life in a rapidly urbanising and interconnected world. Activating the city and wider Emirate, the projects will evolve over the duration of Triennial as part of a comprehensive programme that centres conversation and public interactivity.
Expanding architecture beyond questions of buildings and form, Architecture Otherwise foregrounds social, cultural and political infrastructures to examine how communities emerge and grow. Participants will examine migration, displacement, care, food systems, heritage, public space, climate adaptation, mobility, education, spirituality and collective memory, presenting architecture as an evolving practice rooted in people and relationships. Participants will engage with Sharjah’s layered urban fabric, with some projects developed as part of longer-term residencies, grounding the Triennial in local context.
Several projects investigate what it means to build under conditions of movement, uncertainty and transience. Hiba Bou Akar, Mohamad Hafeda and Nathalie Harb examine how histories of displacement in Lebanon can be carried within mobile, shelter-like installations that incorporate materials from refugee settlements and wartime infrastructures. Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ali Cindoruk, Dilşad Aladağ (Istanbul, Turkey) presents a new iteration of Tumblespace, a moveable and adaptable structure informed by traditions of nomadism that creates temporary communities and dialogue. People's Architecture Office (China/US) reconceives everyday flatbed handcarts used for transporting goods as vehicles for both movement and gathering, which can support communal activities such as dining and theatre performances. ABARI presents Weaving Spaces, a monumental bamboo structure that can be dismantled. Over the course of the Triennial, the structure will move across several locations in Nepal, hosting workshops to celebrate the woven bamboo tradition of Nepal. Sa'dia Rehman presents There Isn’t a Stone I Don’t Remember (2022), a film about her family’s displacement from Pakistan when the state constructed the Tarbela Dam, and an artist book exploring mobile forms of civic infrastructure that emerged in the region after the dam inundated villages, including her father’s ancestral home.
Other participants examine the impacts of large-scale infrastructural development on people and environments. Kush Badhwar's film project explores the ecological and social consequences of the Navi Mumbai International Airport development, weaving together perspectives and voices of affected communities over time. In a major photographic archive, Rajesh Vora and the National Institute of Design revisit six decades of the Sabarmati River in India—once a valued site of water, seasonal rhythms and economic activity—and how recent urban redevelopment transformed its relationship with the city.
In their focus on human experiences of the city, many projects highlight the importance of placing local communities at the centre of urban development. Megawra Built Environment Collective in collaboration with RIWAQ (Cairo, Egypt) bring together practitioners from Egypt and Palestine to explore how heritage in historic cities is shaped through communities and migrant populations, rather than built form alone. Aga Khan Award-winning POCAA (Dhaka, Bangladesh) champions co-creation as a model for planning and placemaking, while Social Design Collaborative (Delhi, India) will work with migrant communities in Sharjah to imagine alternative urban futures. Tanya Zack, Mark Lewis and Thireshen Govender examine how residents actively shape Johannesburg's urban landscape outside dominant economic frameworks. Cassim Shepard's documentary Housing Agency: Mumbai’s Incremental Neighborhoods revisits collaborative approaches to housing developed in India during the late twentieth century, as a hopeful blueprint for future generations amid today’s housing precarity.
Against this backdrop, other projects focus on the communities that emerge within cities and the social infrastructures that sustain them. Another Empty House (Kerala, India/Dubai, UAE) examines Gulf Malayali gathering cultures through “Koottaymas”, self-organised networks of care and support within migrant communities. Karachi LaJamia creates a nomadic community reading room that shares histories of resistance, ecological knowledge and learning from Pakistan, while Kishwar Rizvi documents the city of Karachi's gymkhana social clubs as sites of memory, conservation and civic repair.
Other participants imagine new civic futures through technology, education and creativity. Azza Aboualam (Sharjah, UAE)—building on her project at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025—presents Assemblies, a speculative greenhouse system exploring food production and self-sufficiency in arid environments. Nashin Mahtani/Disaster Map Foundation presents a film about PetaBencana—a real-time disaster-mapping platform for Indonesia—considering how open-source software can function as a form of civic infrastructure for climate adaptation and collective resilience. Curry J. Hackett reflects on Black schooling in the US to reconsider educational institutions as civic stages for new relationships between communities and learning; Sri Lanka-based Let's Build Great Things! works with children from diverse groups in Sharjah to construct a temporary public structure; and Kevin Kimwelle / Indalo World (Cape Town, South Africa / Nairobi, Kenya) explores the power of circular construction as a shared civic practice.
Elsewhere, participants will create environments for contemplation and alternative ways of experiencing the city. Badriyah Alsalem (Kuwait City, Kuwait) reimagines civic infrastructure through traditions of celestial navigation and environmental knowledge, drawing on historic ways of reading the desert sky. Mohamad Nahleh and Ozayr Saloojee explore the imaginative possibility of “night architecture”—a counter to the imperialist urban skylines that dominate through discourses of enlightenment—through storytelling, performance and guided walks. Yaminay Chaudhri and Karachi Beach Radio will focus on the beach as an open, welcoming space through an installation incorporating oral history and sound, and Samar Halloum’s Sabeel, Negotiated focuses on informal acts of resting, waiting and gathering in Sharjah's overlooked urban spaces. Sudarshan Shetty’s (Mumbai, India) video work invokes states of presence and pause amidst the rhythms of urban life, while Ziad Jamaleddine, Makram el Kadi, Iheb Guermazi and Beya Othmani (Beirut, Lebanon) will recast the “khalwa”—Sufi spaces for retreat and meditation—in Sharjah, offering a place for reflection in the contemporary city.
Extending architectural discourse into new cultural forms, several participants will create platforms for collective inquiry that position architecture as a framework for exchange, storytelling and shared knowledge. BARDStudio's Sharjah Glossary and Otherwise School develops an evolving vocabulary drawn from everyday lived experience in Sharjah, suggesting the rich complexity of urban life away from reductive administrative and economic categories. As part of a residency, a project by LionHeart (London, UK) will combine film and poetry to explore alternative forms of architectural literacy, while Torolab (Tijuana, Mexico) will present the Sharjah Cookbook, mapping territory through food systems, labour networks and everyday practices of nourishment. Keller Easterling’s (New York, US) South South Stone Soup uses the folktale of stone soup to imagine how resources can be transformed from private possessions into shared goods, connecting discussions of reparations in the US to broader solidarities across the Global South.
Other installations across the Triennial examine overlooked infrastructures that shape everyday urban experience. Brent Kokonya and Dennis Muraguri's Moving Pluralisms draws on Nairobi's matatu transport system as a mobile architecture of belonging and social encounter. Chloë Bass and Bill Dietz transform public address systems into polyphonic sound installations that amplify multiple voices and forms of shared listening.
Together, the participants of SAT03 propose new understandings of architecture as a practice grounded in collective life, demonstrating how civic infrastructures are continually produced through acts of care, imagination, movement, learning and solidarity.
Curator Vyjayanthi Rao commented: “Architecture Otherwise focuses on how cities are experienced, co-created, and transformed positioning architecture as the medium through which everyday social and cultural practices shape collective life. Against the exceptionalism, extractive logics, and separations that characterize architecture as usual, the Triennial proposes other ways of imagining, inhabiting, and collectively producing the built environment. Through city-wide activations across the five months of the Triennial, residents, practitioners, and visitors will generate new forms of civic engagement and shared meaning, exploring architecture’s entanglement with sound, food, media, materiality, technology, and ecologies. In contrast to architecture as usual, the Triennial repositions architecture as a lived and collective condition rather than a singular object or event.”
Further Special Programming for the Triennial including talks and film screenings will be announced separately.
The full participant list includes: ABARI; Another Empty House; Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ali Cindoruk, Dilşad Aladağ; Azza Aboualam; Badriyah Alsalem; BARDStudio (Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty); Brent Kokonya & Dennis Muraguri; Cassim Shepard; Chloë Bass & Bill Dietz; Curry J. Hackett; Hiba Bou Akar, Mohamad Hafeda & Nathalie Harb; Karachi LaJamia; Keller Easterling; Kevin Kimwelle / Indalo World; Kishwar Rizvi; Kush Badhwar; Let's Build Great Things!; LionHeart; Megawra Built Environment Collective in collaboration with RIWAQ; Mohamad Nahleh & Ozayr Saloojee; Nashin Mahtani/Disaster Map Foundation; People's Architecture Office; POCAA (Platform of Community Action and Architecture); Rajesh Vora and the National Institute of Design; Sa'dia Rehman; Samar Halloum; Social Design Collaborative; Sudarshan Shetty; Tanya Zack, Mark Lewis & Thireshen Govender; Torolab (Raúl Cárdenas); Yaminay Chaudhri & Karachi Beach Radio; and Ziad Jamaleddine, Makram el Kadi, Iheb Guermazi and Beya Othmani.
Press office
Pelham Communications, T +44 (0) 20 8969 3959, @pelhamcomms / Rel Hayman: rel@pelhamcommunications.com / Lucy Groom: lucy@pelhamcommunications.com
Sharjah Architecture Triennial, T +971 50 261 4423, @sharjaharchitecture / Anum Laghari: anum@sharjaharchitecture.org
