Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A knife slices into an engorged oyster to reveal chiselled gemstones among dumpling-like pearls, in a surreal close-up from Stephanie Comilang’s 2025 film installation “Search for Life II”. Shown on giant facing screens with a sculptural wooden pier in between, the Filipino-Canadian artist’s poetic twist on the global pearl industry moves from documentary footage of Filipino free divers and Chinese freshwater cultivators to a Filipino-Emirati singer in a K-pop-style girl group. Underlying actual TikTok sales videos (with their unlikely gems) is a fabular quest for desired, yet accursed, riches.Comilang’s “sci-fi documentary” is showing at the 16th Sharjah Biennial, which opened this month in the maritime United Arab Emirates. The region’s oldest art biennial, founded in 1993, Sharjah’s is increasingly spoken of in the same breath as Venice and São Paulo — as attested to by the throngs of international curators and museum directors bussed between the 17 venues at the preview. Hoor Al Qasimi, its director since 2003, was ranked at number one in ArtReview’s annual Power 100 last December, crystallising an art-world shift towards the Gulf.Yet as Abu Dhabi, Qatar and lately Saudi Arabia jostle to become cultural hubs, with petrodollar-powered museum programmes aimed at diversifying oil-dependent economies, Sharjah’s record in working with artists — notably from the global south — is unique. Wael Shawky’s magisterial film of cyclical creation myths, “I Am Hymns of the New Temples” (2023), shot using puppetry on the Nile and in Pompeii, has its own shed at this biennial. The now feted Egyptian, who won the Sharjah Biennial Award back in 2013, is among artists who have developed past work here with deep input from local people, including residents from Asia and Africa — who make up almost 90 per cent of the population, and whose labour built the UAE.Al Qasimi, daughter of Sharjah’s ruling emir, took over the biennial 22 years ago as a Slade-trained artist, with the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor as a mentor. She founded the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2009 to stage year-round exhibitions. What Al Qasimi now sees as a “huge opening up in representation” is “not about north versus south”, she tells me, but about “being more open in your vision”.Five curators — all women — bring remote networks and hidden experience to a “polyphonic” biennial under the umbrella title, To Carry. Bearing lands, histories, trauma and song across continents, works by 190 artists — including more than 80 new commissions — are ranged around the emirate. At Al Hamriyah studios by the sea, Yhonnie Scarce’s sculptural installation “Operation Buffalo” (2024), a rain cloud of yellow, handblown glass, evokes the radioactive fallout of the 1956 nuclear tests in Australia’s Maralinga desert that devastated her family along with the land.For the New Zealand curator Megan Tamati-Quennell — the “first Maori person curating a biennial on this scale” — placing “First Nation artists in a largely non-western context is hugely exciting”, she tells me. Unlike indigenous art at Venice or Sydney, “it’s informed from a different place.” In a 1970s utopian desert village, abandoned when winds predictably filled the houses with red sand, a sonic installation by the Navajo artist Raven Chacon, using local Bedouin songs, is an ironic reminder of unheeded voices. “Brier Patch” by the African-American artist Hugh Hayden, a bank of school desks strangled by tree branches, further hints at the failings of formal education. More upbeat is Daniel Boyd’s transformation of a futuristic 1970s concrete structure known as the Flying Saucer by covering its windows with indigenous Australian cut-out dots. The filtered light inside recalls the cooling lattice of Islamic mashrabiya.Artists’ recuperation of ancestral wisdom (and custodianship of land) is a strong thread. The Peruvian llama in Claudia Martínez Garay’s carpeted wall hanging “Chunka Tawayuq Pacha” (2022) carries its past and present in the form of chilli peppers and toilet roll, collapsing linear time in a Quechua worldview. In another image from the series, dripping blood frames the conquistadors’ advance. Mangku Muriati’s colourful paintings Kusamba’s War (2024) reinvent a shadow-puppet-like style of Balian visual narrative, rather like neo-miniaturists, to recover the forgotten history of a warrior queen who fought the Dutch. In the Kalba Ice Factory in the Gulf of Oman, Adelita Husni-Bey’s video installation, “Like a Flood” (2025), links the catastrophic collapse of Libyan dams in 2023 to water mismanagement under Italian rule (skewered by a Bedouin sage). Its round screens, also showing floods in Sharjah, are viewed from seating areas inside concrete pipes, like post-apocalyptic dwellings.Sharjah’s maritime history inspires some of the most accomplished works. In a multimedia installation by Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo, “Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes” (2025), Korean shamanic bells and hanging shells are portals and transmitters of ancestral voices. Coastal Ghana is conjured in the Ghanaian-American Rita Mawuena Benissan’s 2024 installation through royal umbrellas, figurative tapestry and chieftains’ seats — all made with Asante artisans. The Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri alludes to marine pollution in “Gastromancer” (2023), an audio installation in which two colossal fibreglass seashells converse about their unwitting sex change. Such mutations, caused by red paint on oil tankers, may be factual, but the imagined dialogue borrows from Thani Al-Suwaidi’s Emirati novella The Diesel (1994), formerly banned in the UAE, about the transgender son of a fisherman — perhaps suggesting the shifting limits of what is now permissible here. In the 2019 biennial, migrant labour was an unspoken thread. Here, “Our Journey” (2019) flaunts textile banners and documentary film by The Voice of Domestic Workers, a UK-based campaigning group. In other outspoken works, a disused vegetable market hosts Aziz Hazara’s video installation, “I Love Bagram (ILB)” (2025), documenting war detritus on an Afghan air base in the wake of Soviet and US-led interventions. “Capital Coup” (2024), a scale model by the Palestinian collective Sakiya, reimagines and mocks the Washington Capitol as a chicken coop.For the Indian curator Natasha Ginwala, based in Sri Lanka and Berlin, while Sharjah’s “globality is unique — a sign of the world shifting”, it provides a “third space” to leap subcontinental barriers. The visionary Kerala-born artist Viswanadhan, based in Paris since 1968, has been written out of Indian art history. But his stunning abstract paintings with the energy of sacred mandalas, and wordless films of coastal Kerala, are showcased here. An installation by the Indian artist Pallavi Paul augments her striking film, “How Love Moves” (2023), with a poignantly embroidered body bag. Structured in five chapters reflecting Islamic prayer times, the film contains testimony of grave-keepers at a Delhi cemetery, who bucked the times by honouring with tenderness and care Muslims killed in 2020 pogroms.“We don’t all have to do the same thing,” Al Qasimi says of more grandiose Gulf projects. “We fill a void.” The most eloquent and understated works here make clear that if, as the Bahraini curator Amal Khalaf puts it, Sharjah is a “meeting place for global south conversations where you don’t have to explain yourself”, the art is to listen in. To June 15, sharjahart.org
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