January 21–June 13, 2027
Sharjah Biennial 17: What remains, sits restive
January 21–June 13, 2027
Opening week programme: January 21–24, 2027
Sharjah, Al Dhaid, Kalba and Khorfakkan
To register for the opening week programme, click here.
Sharjah Art Foundation is pleased to announce further details of the 17th edition of Sharjah Biennial (SB17) and the dates for March Meeting 2027. Curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento, the Biennial convenes under the theme What remains, sits restive. Proposing to engage with the complexity of our times through unresolved pasts, SB17 will take place from 21 January to 13 June 2027 in 11 venues across the Emirate of Sharjah.
The Biennial’s opening week programme, slated from 21 to 24 January, unfolds across four cities: Sharjah, Al Dhaid, Kalba and Khorfakkan. Each day will feature exhibition tours, performances, activations and screenings.
Highlights of the opening week programme include Ângela Ferreira’s intervention into a 1970s cinema—a node upon which various postcolonial geographies, histories and aesthetics converge—asking what happens when architecture travels; Cynthia Zaven’s performance revives a lost tradition of women’s sea songs in the Arab Gulf, some sung by women as an expression of collective grief, others reaffirming the role of women left behind.
Composed of sound-generating sculptures, Christian Salablanca Díaz’s assemblage is rooted in his memories of boat trips with his father along the Sierpe mangrove forest on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. Jessica Ekomane and Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape will both present sonic performances set in the diverse landscapes of Sharjah.
The opening week will conclude with Present Uneven, a film programme curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Tevž Logar, featuring video works that explore how past aspirations and political imaginaries persist, transform and resurface.
Venues
Sharjah: Arts Square, Calligraphy Square, Al Mureijah Square, Photography Gallery, The Flying Saucer, Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation
Al Dhaid: Al Dhaid Art Centre, Arts Palace and Farm
Kalba: Kalba Ice Factory
Khorfakkan: Khorfakkan Hall, Khorfakkan Cinema
March Meeting: March 19–21, 2027
The 18th edition of March Meeting takes place from March 19 to 21, 2027, offering discursive sessions that expand the Biennial’s curatorial concept and artistic inquiries. The programme includes commissioned performances by Biennial participants.
Through his solo multimedia performance, Victor Gama recirculates Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho’s legacy by weaving the anthropologist’s handwritten insights with southern African polyrhythms, electronic music and contemporary compositions. Wendy Morris’s procession travels towards the breakwater at dusk, while singing a lament to the Arabian Gulf—known as the ‘bitter sea’ in some ancient civilisations. Hassan Khan performs his recent songs and hip-hop tracks written in response to our turbulent times.
During the three-day March Meeting, tours to the Biennial are offered every evening, along with a free bus tour to the central and eastern regions on 18 March 2027.
About Sharjah Biennial 17
Our present is troubled by what remains of unlived pasts, of the defeated yet undead projects of a modernity premised on universal emancipation. Rather than passive and dormant, these remainders continue to animate the present with their restive rhythms, shaping the politics of time and space. Histories resurface and endure, not as pure recurrence but as residues and morphed processes actively informing the now.
Grounded in this common theme, Sharjah Biennial 17: What remains, sits restive brings together two different approaches, each articulated by one of the two curators: Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento.
Angela Harutyunyan traces the various afterlives of socialist modernity, as observed from the peripheries of modernisation and anti-colonial struggles. Can art confront the hard-shell of late capitalist alienation by activating what remains of these emancipatory projects? Harutyunyan’s presentation brings together 55 participants who engage with this question to produce deeper insights into the means and forms of representation for a reality replete with contradictions.
The present moment has been shaped not only by these spectres of unlived pasts, but also by the slow violences of cultural silencing and oppression. The 54 participants invited by Paula Nascimento use infrastructure as a method to explore how place and memory intersect in both tangible and intangible ways, proposing new vocabularies to help us navigate the intricacy of our times.
Media contact: Joseph dela Cerna, joseph@sharjahart.org
