Inside Sharjah Biennial 2025: Colonial board game, celebration of the mandala and migrant stories

Verbs are not often used as thematic titles for art festivals, but the one selected for the Sharjah Biennial is elegantly equivocal.

To Carry, this year's theme, reflects on the many aspects we individually carry, from memories and homes to languages, histories, wounds and ruptures. Yet, by its nature of being a verb, the title also evokes an active state of being and development. To carry something is not a passive act. The artworks at the biennial boldly explore this concept.

The event has been curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Oz. The curators come from disparate practices and backgrounds. Their research ranges from the role of storytelling in collective learning and activism to explorations of societal and economic systems. As such, each curator has brought a distinct focus to the biennial and its theme.

Ginwala says: “This idea of return is something that I think about in the long past, really looking at ancestral memory, place-making, cultural histories. How we ourselves are vessels of the past and the imminent futures, whether as immigrants, as those in exile, or as those preparing to travel.”

More than 650 artworks are on show. The works are being presented in 17 locations across Sharjah, extending beyond the city to include sites in Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid and Kalba. The works are each deeply personal, responding to the theme in an idiosyncratic manner. Some reflect migrant experiences or overlooked pockets of history. Others re-examine age-old customs and traditions with a novel twist.

In her Pacha textile series, for instance, Peruvian artist Claudia Martinez Garay draws inspiration from Andean cosmovision, an idea that suggests that everything in the cosmos is interconnected. The title of the series, Pacha, is also a word in Quechua, an indigenous Andean language, that refers to the three cosmological realms of the upper world, the living world and the underworld. Garay’s textiles contain elements that denote these realms, often with a touch of humour and with a collagist’s visual sensibilities.

One of the works, Chunka Tawayug Pacha, features a floating llama that gawks back at the viewer with a hint of annoyance. The animal is carrying a series of objects, from chilli peppers to toilet paper, a corn cob to a baby and a human head. The objects are tethered in a network of ropes with a blossoming peak that rises towards the sky.

Lebanese artist Raafat Majzoub, meanwhile, carries his background as an architect within his work. Streetschool Prototype 1.1, Everything-in your love-becomes easy is part of an ongoing project by Majzoub to create a "school" from salvaged materials. In this iteration, the artist, collaborating with a local team, has utilised materials sourced from architectural sites under renovation across Sharjah. Interlocked tiles, discarded tyres and cinderblocks come together to form a communal space. At the centre is a video that shows an earlier version of the project, which took place in Lebanon, and provides insight into the process.

Majzoub says: “The project started with a personal story. I had a garden in front of my house. The municipality wanted to turn it into a parking lot, and no one was fighting for a garden. I thought that maybe we turn it into a school. People with my first school, but I failed.”

Yet, the experience inspired an idea he has sought to replicate in different cities across the region. In Tripoli, the school was built out of garbage. In Abu Dhabi, it was made out of palm leaves. And in Ramallah, the project was materialised using trashed artist materials.

The project, Majzoub says, is aimed at bringing people together with an artwork where resources are scarce, not paying anything for materials and paying everyone involved an equal fee.

British artist Olivia Plender, on the other hand, is taking on the history of British colonialism with a satirical board game. Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game about Debt (or a Social Satire) is described as “a rigged board game that parodies the effects of British land privatisation, debt and colonisation".

“I wanted to create an artwork that people would have to inhabit,” she says. “When you're playing a game, you're engaged in it. Your emotions are engaged with it. This sort of sense of the system being rigged, if you're in the game, you feel that very acutely. I've made versions of it which are playable. And people get quite angry, they start to feel that there's something something wrong here.”

The game, she says, is also meant to spark conversations about a period of British history that most in the UK don’t talk about.

“Within the context of Britain, people don't talk very much about the British Empire,” Plender says. “When it comes to the Middle East region, there's very thin awareness about the British history in the region and colonial presence. In the time period when I was making the game, there was so much going on in the Middle East that had to do with British intervention.”

The biennial is also giving a platform to pioneering artists from the Global South, including Velu Viswanathan. A space has been devoted to the Indian painter, showing his unique take on abstraction. The works, dating back to the 1980s, are inspired by the sacred geometry of yantras and mandalas, but depict a propensity towards abstraction that is wholly unique. Triangular forms emerge out of dark swirls and swathes of red. Tiles of teal and orange are rendered in arrangements that evoke lilting, and at times dizzying, feelings.

“It is a form of abstraction that is very rooted in spirituality, coming from southern India, coming from Kerala,” Ginwala says. “His family also was making mandalas, making temple sculptures, doing carpentry work, making jewellery.” The exhibition space is unique and instils the feeling of being in one of Viswanathan’s works."

There are also several works of monumental and awe-inspiring scale. Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri, for instance, is presenting Gastromancer. The work features two colossal seashell sculptures that are suspended in a red room. “It follows my practice around the topic of oil and its cultural legacies and social legacies,” she says.

“I found this amazing story of how in the 1980s they discovered that the reddish paint on oil tankers seeps into the water and causes changes in the marine population. One of these changes, which I found very interesting and almost science fiction, was that it would cause the seashells to change their genders, from female to male.”

Al Qadiri was engrossed by this phenomenon, wondering how the seashells dealt with the change. “I started imagining a conversation between the two seashells about what happened to them,” she says.

For Gastromancer, she used excerpts from the 1994 novel The Diesel by Thani Al Suwaidi. The book was an apt choice, namely in how it explores concepts of identity and transformation in the Gulf. “I thought it was super fascinating to work in text, so I adapted it into a dialogue,” Al Qadiri says.

Sharjah Biennial is running until June 15. More information is available at sharjahart.org