Over the past three decades, Sharjah Biennial and Sharjah Art Foundation have provided an internationally recognised platform for artists underrepresented in the global art canon, while offering perspectives from across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Through these years, the Foundation has established an archive of contemporary thought and form generated by artists through commissions and exhibitions, performances and conversation and its public collection of modern and contemporary art. This exhibition identifies key themes evident throughout the collection and brings them together in an exploration of artists whose work engages with concepts of longing, belonging and rootedness.
Through three thematic chapters, the exhibition examines the increasingly mutable notion of home. The artists herein have traversed migratory routes from South and West Asia, through Africa and the Caribbean, and many now live in dispersed sites, far from where they first believed that they belonged. Tracing a travelogue through multiple sites, histories and geographies that link the ethnic Global Majority, In the Heart of Another Country displays a re-imagining of a once colonised world, exploring the politics of place and placelessness through myriad art forms and genres, including painting, portraiture, architecture and abstraction, from the twentieth century to the present. Recently restored installations are displayed alongside contemporary acquisitions, narrating a communal story of kinship amongst artists—one often developed against a backdrop of political turmoil and social unrest.
Drawing inspiration from the late artist and author Etel Adnan’s landmark memoir, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2004), the exhibition charts sentiments of longing, memorial and homecoming though a constellation of artworks that unfold across borders, both real and imagined. From the tessellating architectural structures conceived by Saloua Raouda Choucair to the sensuous abstraction found in the paintings of Huguette Caland, these forms convene in space and in dialogue with the arched architectures of Sonia Balassanian, whose work is being presented at the Foundation for the first time. A significant geometric abstraction by Marcos Grigorian is shown alongside Adam Henein’s delicate drawings on papyrus. In between these visual journeys are extensive presentations of the reconfigured body, as seen in self-portraits by Rasheed Araeen and Amal Kenawy, whose evocative images reveal the possibilities of distinguishing the self and the other.
Questions of nationalism, space and refuge emerge in an illuminating work by Halil Altindere and in the textured seascape of Minam Apang. Through the gathering of these forms and stories, a sensory choreography emerges—one that emphasises the affinity of belonging to a collective diasporic imagination. Here, home is seen as a proposition—a site of becoming, albeit one constantly subject to interpretation and interrogation.
Organised by Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Sharjah Art Foundation, the exhibition is curated by Dr Omar Kholeif, Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation.
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