When a global art event of such importance as the Sharjah Biennial chooses five curators (Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell) with long-standing advocacy for the Global South, one immediately wonders what the subaltern will be allowed to say, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s pathbreaking 2010 book on the subject. Sharjah Biennial 16, “to carry,” tackles these demands through disparate choices, with a few remarkable practices standing out in a sea of repetitive discourse. Part of this imbroglio is by design, an inevitable outcome of the decision to have so many curators, each with distinct ideas about what a biennial should address. Nonetheless, they were all in agreement on the media of interest: The show featured an overwhelming quantity of textile-based practices, showed a penchant for large-scale installations and video projections, and almost completely eschewed painting.
Seventeen sites were chosen from Sharjah’s breathtaking landscapes, featuring a ghost city swallowed by sand, a traditional vegetable market, and a building formerly used to store ice. But the absence of a cohesive exhibition design makes it easy to feel lost, even within a single venue, where monographic and group presentations often begin and end without any clear indication. Working in harmony with locations that have such historical weight can be challenging for artists. The task is admirably taken on by Adelita Husni-Bey in her installation Like a Flood, 2025, in which big pipes serve as shelters from which to watch a forty-five-minute video that shines a light on the destruction of Libya’s ancient water systems during Italian colonization (1911–43). By revealing the traces of a colonial history investigated through archival photography, the work makes visible what was meant to stay in the shadows: how water infrastructure was employed to control and extract natural elements—an example of biopolitical violence and erasure carried out in the name of modernization.
More broadly, however, this configuration resulted in a chaotic, sometimes incoherent, argument. For instance, Rully Shabara’s Khawagaka, 2012–25, a mock museum display about a fictional civilization, appeared in the middle of a pavilion featuring several works selected to honor ancestral knowledge, leaving many viewers mistaking its fake artifacts for real ones. Such misunderstandings are a symptom of a curatorial narrative that prioritizes celebrating the perpetuation of ancestral practices over examining how these practices mix and meld in response to a colonial past whose traces permeate the present.
The major question posed by the biennial in this context is, how does an artist’s work transcend its cultural framework and connect with alterity, letting the viewer find a path through difference? Some propositions give us a hint. Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s tropical-tech take on the Indigenous Nahua cosmovision, Cincoatl, 2024, consists of a robotic sculpture in which a serpent made out of industrial materials (motors, plastic, etc.) is connected by tangled electricity wires to a spider shaped out of soil, proposing a duality between form and material to discuss the survival of Mesoamerican cosmology. In Luana Vitra’s -+, 2025, material becomes a living diagram in an installation composed of iron derivatives from Minas Gerais, Brazil’s major mining state and the artist’s homeland. Vitra bends hematites, iron stones, and blue iron-oxide pigments using embedded magnets, revealing what she calls the “material’s desire”: a form of creation that respects the magnet’s intrinsic polarities, instead of reinforcing its bondage to an exploitative purpose.
For all the biennial’s shortcomings, it is refreshing to witness an event with such an uncompromising historical commitment to the Global South. But does this globalized perspective simply cater to a globalized audience expectation, rather than challenging it? John Clang’s performance Reading by an Artist, 2023–, presents a good strategy: In the middle of Calligraphy Square, the artist connected with the audience through a fortune-telling technique of zi wei dou shu, a metaphysical philosophy dating back to imperial China. Offering viewers not a look at the other, but at themselves and their own potential futures, the piece invites us to face our own desires and attend to oblique and enigmatic practices that may offer valuable insight.
