to carry, Sharjah Biennial 16, 2025

The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered. 

The Biennial title, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?

Thus, ‘to carry’ proposes the Biennial as a collective wayfinding, a modality of sense-making and insistent looking—back, inwards and across—instead of a ‘turning away’ amidst tides of annihilation and tyranny. Sharjah Biennial 16 curatorial projects reflect on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities. As community doulas would hold space for others during moments of transition, the projects collectively form a threshold space for experiments and collaborations, in which we compose divergent stories, understand failures and dark moments, and hold room for tenderness and rage. 

As carriers of different processes and offerings, the curators have cultivated their projects together and apart, allowing room for listening, mutual support and the sharing of resources. Diverse curatorial methodologies—from residencies, workshops and collective production to writing, sonic experiences and expanded publications—are constantly present in the milieu of the Biennial, encouraging critical conversations. Sometimes, projects by different curators sit together in one venue to form a wild polyphony; at other times, they occupy an entire space to recite a story. Together, they form an evolving collection of narratives told from multiple perspectives, geographies and languages.

Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, Sharjah Biennial 16 features works by more than 190 participants, including over 200 new commissions, which will be presented across the Emirate of Sharjah. 

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Daniel Boyd is a leading Indigenous Australian artist of Kudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, Yuggera and ni-Vanuatu descent. Based in Sydney, he works across painting, sculpture, video and site responsive installations. He often interrogates the ways in which Indigenous people and knowledges are represented in western an colonial contexts. In his distinctive painting practice, images are overlain with an intricate arrangement of dots that he refers to as lenses or oculi. The dots offer multiple entry or exit points into his work and communicate the fragmented nature of knowledge and perception. Boyd's work is frequently underpinned by the idea of opacity, a concept conceived by cultural theorist Édouard Glissant, which is defined as a strategy for resistance, acknowledging unknowability and the limitations of human understanding. Since 2017, Boyd has created site-responsive installations that align with the idea he explores with his paintings. His installations reimagine and transform space by using circular cut-outs that work with light, darkness and idea of accumulation. 
– Megan Tamati–Quennel