The Daily Star, Lebanon
April 13 2005

Sharjah biennial: Wild card of culture in Arab world
Emirate puts on show that will endure through production of new and
original bodies of work

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, April 13, 2005

SHARJAH, U.A.E.: The art world dropped down on the sleepy Emirate of
Sharjah last week for the opening of an international biennial of
contemporary art intended to strengthen Sharjah’s reputation as a
cultural node in the Gulf’s otherwise exceedingly commercial tissue.

Sharjah Biennial 7 – which will be up and running at the Sharjah Expo
Center and Sharjah Art Museum through June 6 – launched with a
sprawling exhibition and a series of discussions.

Among the questions at play were: What can or should set the Sharjah
Biennial apart from other such events held every two years in nearly
every city in the world worth its salt? What can the Sharjah Biennial
contribute to the development of an art scene in Sharjah? What is the
relationship between the Sharjah Biennial and its local, regional,
and international context? And what is an event like this doing in
Sharjah, anyway?

Loosely arranged under the banner of “Belonging,” this Sharjah
Biennial features 74 artists from 36 countries. The exhibition’s
curatorial team includes Jack Persekian, the founder and director of
the Al-Mamal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem and an
influential curator responsible for, among other shows,
“DisORIENTation” in Berlin two years ago; Ken Lum, a Vancouver-based
artist who has long dealt with issues of creating art in politically
fraught circumstances; and Tirdad Zolghadr, a writer and curator
living in Zurich with an interest in how ethnicity is spun in an era
of globalization.

Together they interpreted the theme broadly and generously, allowing
enough space for each curator to posit his own particular point of
view.

“My personal concern and my personal investment,” says Persekian,
stems from “my identity, coming from Palestine, a place that is
completely torn apart. There’s that, being of Armenian descent,
carrying an American passport, and there’s my encounter with this
place. I was astonished by the sprawling development that has nothing
to do with land – offshore projects, reclaimed land, buildings going
up. There are so many foreigners here making a home. It’s the
antithesis of where I’m from.”

Like Persekian, many of the participating artists and attending
curators found themselves grappling with the sheer strangeness of
Sharjah, a sun-swept city-state with a population of 600,000 and 85
percent of them nonnationals. (Sharjah houses substantially large
Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi ex-patriate communities.)

As one of the seven tiny emirates that make up the U.A.E., Sharjah is
squashed between Saudi Arabia, the Sultanate of Oman, and the Gulf
(whether you choose to define it as Persian or Arabian). Fifty years
ago it was a fishing village. Twenty years ago it was the preeminent
playground of the emirates, before Abu Dhabi and before Dubai,
drenched in oil money and bumping with clubs, girls and drinks.
Today, in a rather dramatic transformation, it is the single most
conservative emirate of all, austere, ascetic, policed by draconian
decency laws prohibiting alcohol, bars, late-night Internet cafes,
immodest dress, indecent speech, and the improper mixing of men and
women.

As such, Sharjah stands in the shadow of neighboring Dubai, where a
woman companion is easy to select. But just as Dubai’s audacious
architectural and financial development – proceeding at a pace of
global capitalism on potent speed – has been calibrated for the
foreseeable exhaustion of oil reserves, Sharjah’s restraint has a
strategic dimension.

In 1998 Unesco named Sharjah the “cultural capital” of the Arab
world. Sharjah’s ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, is
banking on the distinction by introducing an onslaught of
tourist-friendly arts initiatives and heritage preservations
projects. The biennial plays into that hand, but it may very well
prove to be a wild card.

The seventh outing at Sharjah is, more accurately, the second of its
kind. Prior to the last biennial, the sheikh’s daughter, Sheikha Hoor
al-Qasimi, returned home from art school in London and bashed the
event for being too traditional. Her father advised her to do
something about it, so she took over as director. The sixth edition
in 2003, curated by her and Peter Lewis (a lecturer at Goldsmith’s
College in London), was dramatically different from the previous
five.

With 117 artists from all over the world, including Christo and
William Kentridge (who won the biennial’s top prize), it was notably
more critical and cutting edge. Sharjah 6 was not without problems,
however, including organizational issues and instances of last-minute
censorship (political and sexual material was either obscured or
removed).

To a large extent, the same held true for Sharjah 7 (though in what
seems to be positive development, the political content, whether
subtle or strong, remained on view this year).

Persekian took over the curatorial duties after Sharjah’s first team
was dismissed. He had just six months to pull everything together. As
Lum suggests: “With such a compressed time frame it could have been a
disaster.”

In terms of actual artworks, the exhibition is anything but. Spread
across two spaces, the show is constructed so that viewers experience
each artist’s work individually and intimately, each in rooms of
their own. (The Sharjah Expo Center is the size of an airplane hanger
and for this event, temporary walls have been erected to divide the
voluminous white space; the Sharjah Art Museum is designed like a
minimalist souk, with long corridors and a succession of boxy rooms
like refined market stalls.)

There are very few paintings or drawings on view but photography
makes an impressive showing and video art is plentiful enough to be
mind-numbing.

Sculptures and object-based installations are judiciously few, making
those that are on display here, such as Emily Jacir’s baggage claims
conveyor belt and Zoe Leonard’s arrangement of vintage suitcases, all
the more powerful in their visual and spatial punch.

Among the highlights are Fouad Elkoury’s luscious and nasty series of
photographs, “Civilization: Fake = Real;” Tarek al-Ghoussein’s spare
scenes of Sharjah’s construction sites, printed on rice paper and
installed in such a way that sparks a clear association between these
photographs and images of the barrier wall Israel is building in
Palestine; Mohammed Kazem’s evocative light-boxes illuminating the
ways in which the emirates are being built on the blood and sweat of
a foreign workforce; the first in Suha Shoman’s double-barreled
installation; Jayce Salloum’s visually and intellectually rich
dual-screen video “Beauty and the East”; and Marwan Rechmaoui’s
stately, interactive “Beirut Caoutchouc,” a huge rubber floor piece
that will soon enter the collection of the Sharjah Art Museum.

The biennial’s three prize winners were selected by a jury featuring
artist and writer Walid Sadek, blockbuster curator Okwui Enwezor (who
was responsible for the last groundbreaking Documenta), and Rina
Carvajal (the head curator of a new museum called Art Miami Central).
They opted to hand out the awards equally rather than ranked (the
Sharjah Biennial is somewhat unique in that it offers cash instead of
prestige prizes; in this case each winning artist received $10,000,
which, of course, is no chump change).

Maja Bajevic won for a somber series of photographs depicting
Christmas lights in a bleak Bosnian landscape, an attempt to recover
some semblance of normalcy in adhering to an international calendar,
even when the holidays don’t apply and the street lights lead down a
dead-end road.

Mario Rizzi won for his exuberant six-screen video installation
entitled “Out of Place (Images Deracine),” exploring the experiences
of second generation immigrants in Paris, a work that is well-paced,
moving, and masterfully mixed.

And finally, Moataz Nasr won for his trenchant video work “The Echo,”
which is structured like a dialogue between two screens, one
projecting a classic scene from Youssef Chahine’s film “Al-Ard” (The
Earth), the other projecting a re-enactment of the same scene by
Egyptian storyteller Chirine al-Ansary in a downtown Cairo coffee
shop.

In addition to the main exhibition spaces, the Sharjah Biennial was
meant to include a number of public art projects, an initiative that
was basically scrapped because of logistic and technical issues.
Pinpointing meaningful examples of public space is difficult in
Sharjah. What’s more, says Lum, “Here it’s hard to compete with the
extreme piety of public space. We already knew it would be a
restriction.”

“We tried our best to invite every artist ahead of time,” adds
Persekian. “We wanted artists to have this opportunity and we tried.
Some did. Not all of them could.”

The most striking – and probably the most enduring – thing about the
seventh edition of Sharjah is this: the biennial produced nearly 20
new and original bodies of work.

Artists such as Yu Hong, Nari Ward, Olaf Nicolai, Elkoury, Rizzi,
Bajevic, and many more were able to produce as part of the Sharjah
program.

The place, at present, may have no viable art public, no local
audience, and no mechanisms for critical discourse. But it does have
the potential to operate as a sort of independent laboratory or
isolated think tank – a place to create work and perhaps find the
right words to raise questions.

“The biennial does not present any answers. We don’t have any
answers. It’s more of a discussion,” says Persekian. “All the
questions about how this relates to local society, what would it mean
to a taxi driver, to someone who came for a job – to me that means
that whatever you do here, it has to open up a space for
a conversation.”

Sharjah Biennial 7 remains open through June 6. For more information,
check out