November 14–19, 2026
United Arab Emirates
Triennial dates: November 14, 2026–April 14, 2027 / Press day: November 13, 2026 / Opening programme dates: November 14–19, 2026
The Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT) announces the full opening programme of its third edition (SAT03), Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures, curated by writer and anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao with Associate Curator Tau Tavengwa. Taking place from November 14–19, 2026, the programme will activate the Triennial through participatory projects, live performances and film screenings. These will take place alongside lectures and roundtable discussions centering conversation and public interactivity, culminating in a major two-day conference inviting international scholars, architects and artists. The programme is co-curated by Rao and Sharmeen Inayat, Research and Civic Engagement Curator at SAT.
Expanded from previous editions, the six-day programme will bring the central proposition of Architecture Otherwise into the public realm: that architecture can be understood not only through the physical structures of cities, but through the relationships, practices, knowledge and forms of exchange that enable collective life. The edition features 35 participants whose multidisciplinary forms of enquiry will engage local, regional and international audiences across the entire Emirate, with venues including the Al Qasimiyah School, the Al Jubail Vegetable Market, Al Madam Buried Village and the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization (SMIC).
The opening week will invite audiences to experience and activate projects, with participant-led tours and live interventions animating the Triennial’s installations and ideas. These include Tumblespace (or What Binds Us?) by Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ali Cindoruk and Dilşad Aladağ, a nomadic structure that creates temporary spaces for gathering and exchange, asking how people, movement and place are connected; and Badriyah Alsalem, whose performance lectures The Houses of the Moon and Names of the Sun draw on observation, poetry and cultural astronomy to explore relationships between landscape, time and the sky.
The programme will also feature live performances that interrogate cultural practices and how sound and movement shape our experience and connection to space, such as BORROWED TIME: trails and tentacles in popular music by Pakistani-American singer Ali Sethi. Origami Bodies by choreographer Omar Rajeh, presented in dialogue with Ziad Jamaleddine’s SAT project Lalla Alwyia Khalwa, brings together Rajeh’s approach to movement informed by maqam—a practice of instantaneous composition and creation—with Jamaleddine’s reinterpretation of the khalwa, a secluded space traditionally associated with Sufi retreat and meditation. Bassist and composer Melvin Gibbs will present Convergence, exploring the connections between rhythm, vibration and movement through globally informed Black diasporic musical traditions.
Film screenings throughout the opening programme will explore the histories, lived realities and material conditions embedded within cities and their infrastructures. The Tower: A Concrete Utopia by Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji examines independent approaches to urban space in Kinshasa, while Housing Agency: Incremental Mumbai by Cassim Shepard considers how the energy and adaptability of informal settlement practices influenced the government’s approaches to alternative housing in India. Other screenings include Ignacio Gatica’s Sanhattan, exploring Santiago’s financial district and its relationship to New York, and Ruchir Joshi’s Memories of Milk City, reflecting on memory and displacement in Ahmedabad.
These will sit alongside a series of conversations bringing architects, artists, researchers and cultural practitioners in dialogue with SAT03 participants and curators to consider how cities are shaped through different factors and forms of knowledge. The opening conversation Building Civic Muscles will consider the built environment through the everyday practices, identities, economies and social relations that give space its meaning, featuring Edgar Pieterse (Founding Director of African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town), Mabel O. Wilson (Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation) and Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA) in conversation with Vyjayanthi Rao and Tau Tavengwa.
Panel discussions will also include The Action is the Form, moderated by Sharmeen Inayat and considering the systems, protocols and relations that organise how space is occupied; and The Trouble with Images, which examines the image as a constructed and contested field in which histories are selected, framed and made legible, featuring Rania Stephan (filmmaker), Amarnath Praful (artist) and moderated by Thomas Keenan (Professor at Bard College, New York).
Further roundtables featuring SAT03 participants include Gaps in the Gulf, moderated by Civil Architecture, which will consider the gaps and alternative temporalities that complicate narratives of inevitable urban transformation; Time and the City, which explores how urban environments hold, transmit and renegotiate different temporalities; and Acoustic Archaeologies, moderated by Camila Palomino (curator and researcher), which considers how sound, radio and voice work as spatial practices, featuring Yousef Anastas and Elias Anastas of Radio Alhara.
The opening programme will culminate on November 18–19 with a two-day conference at Africa Hall, Area Studies, Global Studies and Urban Studies: History, Politics and the Epistemology of Locality, organised in collaboration with Global Studies University. Bringing together an international group of scholars, architects, artists and researchers, the conference will examine how knowledge about cities and regions is produced, and how local histories and experiences can challenge dominant narratives of urban development.
The conference will include a series of panel conversations, including Movement Ecologies, considering architecture as a negotiation with shifting ecologies and temporalities, with Rachaporn Choochuey (architect and co-founder of all(zone)), Soumini Raja (Professor at Avani Institute of Design, Kerala) and Mona El Mousfy (Founding Advisor to SAT); Minor Planning, examining urban planning as an open-ended process embedded in everyday life, with Hessa Al Nuaimi (Assistant Professor, The Asia Institute, Global Studies University), Catalina Ortiz (Professor, UCL), Neha Vora (Professor of Anthropology, American University of Sharjah) and Dubravka Sekulić (Senior Tutor at the RCA); and The Ruins We Carry, exploring how people build and sustain institutions, practices and forms of collective life in the wake of rupture and displacement, with Emily Jacir (artist and filmmaker), Filip de Boeck (Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Leuven), Ibrahim Nehme (Director of Beirut Art Center) and Camila Palomino.
The conference will also feature lectures by AbdouMaliq Simone (professor and sociologist) and Manthia Diawara (writer and filmmaker). Musician Ulaş Özdemir will perform Places We Carry in dialogue with Tumblespace or What Binds Us? by Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ali Cindoruk (KHORA) and Dilşad Aladağ to explore musical traditions as living forms that travel, transform and carry histories across places and generations. The conference will conclude with ‘Reflections on the Production of Locality’, a lecture and conversation on what it means to study the local when the local is always being made through forces that exceed it, featuring Arjun Appadurai (anthropologist and Professor Emeritus at NYU) and curator Vyjayanthi Rao.
Together, the six-day opening programme events bring to life SAT03’s investigation into how architecture might operate not simply as a physical discipline, but as a framework for collective knowledge, exchange and action.
Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, said: “With this edition of SAT, we hope to create not simply an exhibition about architecture, but a space in which different ways of making, inhabiting and imagining the city can meet. It has been conceived and developed in close dialogue with the institution's wider initiatives and research, forming part of a longer effort to build an institution in Sharjah that understands architecture as a civic practice: attentive to where we are, open to where we might go, and committed to the futures we might build together.”
SAT03 curator Vyjayanthi Rao said: “Architecture is about much more than the buildings we see. It is shaped by how people live, care for one another and adapt the spaces around them. Cities are constantly evolving, shaped by the people who inhabit them and the connections that link local experiences to wider global realities. Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures explores how these everyday forms of knowledge can inspire new ways of living together. Throughout the opening week of the Third Sharjah Architecture Triennial, conversations, performances and public gatherings will consider how architecture can foster connection, belonging and coexistence.”
For the full opening week programme, click here.
The full list of SAT03 participants includes: ABARI; Abounaddara; 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; Ignacio Gatica; 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; Sandra Calvo Guzman; 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.
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