SAF announces curators of Sharjah Biennial 17

Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda.

‘Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact. Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories,’ says Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. ‘Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.’

Working in close collaboration, the curators will shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah.

‘The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,’ says Harutyunyan. ‘I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.’

For Paula Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with forms and models of exhibition-making, and as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. ‘I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between artmaking and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art's capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,’ she says.