The 13th Sharjah Biennial ran from March 10th to June 12th 2017, and featured approximately 90 artists. The show had four main locations, and was viewable in two long days.
Before even reaching the Sharjah Biennial, one encountered signs of its importance. On the internet, it was trumpeted as one of the top ten contemporary art biennials, and the most renowned one in the Middle East. Its significance was revealed by the willingness of biennial after biennial to feature the many works it had wholly or partially funded, and by the readiness of important events such as Art Dubai (the region’s most important art fair) to schedule themselves around the biennial’s opening. And though Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial are two of the UAE’s most prestigious contemporary art shows, the glamour of Art Dubai contrasts sharply with the Sharjah Biennial’s reputation for seriousness.
For a short while, the drive from the art fair to the Biennial seemed to represent the difference between these two shows. From Art Dubai, the route passed by many of the city’s famous landmarks and its newest areas with the most ostentatious construction projects. It started near a peninsula shaped like a palm tree, encountered a hotel fashioned after a sail, and the world’s tallest building appeared in the distance. The route went towards the city’s older neighborhoods. Crossing the Dubai Creek felt like edging backwards from this dystopian future. Finally, one reached the sobriety that was Sharjah. Its buildings took the form of buildings, and peninsulas, peninsulas. Dubai’s spectacle culture was over. But the route to the Biennial had not yet ended.
The Sharjah Biennial’s newest location, Al Hamriyah Studios, was not in Sharjah. When asked, the Biennial’s staff explained that it was a half hour drive from the Biennial’s main location. A bus service had ferried visitors there through the opening week. Now the staff was only able to give you the studio’s satellite coordinates. They told you that it was near Al Hamriyah beach. Armed with this, you approached a half dozen different cabdrivers. They did not know Al Hamriyah Beach, and the satellite coordinates were meaningless to them. They offered to take you to any number of other beaches. Frustrated, you spent half an hour on Google Maps and had a strained conversation with your hotel’s “concierge.” Eventually, he found the studio near a public beach. You were in a cab. Then the city of Sharjah ended and the buildings spread out. Then, nothing. For a while, the horizon cut perfectly straight, uninterrupted, across an almost empty landscape. Then Al Hamriyah started, the buildings approached each other, and the public beach appeared. But nothing there suggested an exhibition space, not even of the warehouse or abandoned building type. And just as it became clear how impossible it would be to find a cab home, there, Al Hamriyah Studios appeared. It was resplendent, white and modern, an alien presence in a landscape stocked with many mundane buildings. Al Hamriyah Studios was clearly an art institution. It was a graceful square structure, with a courtyard, and long glass-lined corridors, empty except for a couple of friendly docents. Nervously, you clung to your cab. Could it wait? The docents gentled you. They coaxed you into the institution with promises of a cab “When you’re done.”
They could not have been nicer. When they finally left you alone, the emptiness of the space triggered a fantasy. You imagined the Biennial’s opening celebration, the VIPs partying in the building’s open courtyard, and the Biennial’s buses crowding the building’s oversized parking lot. The building seemed created for this audience, perfect for this sort of occasion, and meant to enhance the Biennial’s reputation. But as one of the show’s already infrequent visitors, arriving a few days after opening week, with the bus service over, in a cab, lost, you could not help but feel like the uninvited guest.
As you struggled to understand the show, this feeling continued. You began to suspect that the Biennial was created almost exclusively to woo an elite art audience. And though a beefy little catalogue did a decent job of explaining individual works, the curator’s essay was sparse, obscure, and failed to adequately explain the show’s central themes, a flaw that mostly disadvantaged a non-elite audience that was less aware of the current trends of the art world. The essay never mentioned the show’s viewers but insisted on the Biennial’s role in creating a community of artists and curators, and spent a disproportionate amount of its time on satellite projects (in Dakar, Istanbul, Ramallah, and Beirut), projects that most of the show’s audience will never see. Along with the difficulty getting to the Biennial’s newest location in Al Hamriyah, all of these pointed to the show’s willingness to sacrifice a broader audience in pursuit of an elite one.
In the Biennial’s often empty spaces, it was hard not to wonder if this emptiness was indicative of the show’s overall attendance. Its opening clearly drew an elite audience, but whether, over the course of its run the show attracted a broader one, was less clear. It seemed unlikely. This would be a problem not only because the stated goal of most biennials is to foster cultural exchange, but also because one of the compelling arguments for biennials, as a form, is that they create transnational public spheres, allowing a public to imagine itself as part of a larger community. Without a broader audience, even the most serious, politically engaged show is just a spectacle that enhances a city’s reputation without affecting its viewers or creating a public, making it little different than peninsulas in the shape of palm trees or a hotel in the form of a sail. It would be especially disappointing if the Sharjah Biennial failed to attract a broader audience, because it was an otherwise excellent show.
***
Much of the Sharjah Biennial’s work explored how nature was reflected, framed in art, language, law, and in other forms of culture. This theme created a productive context for a number of familiar works and showed that the way a culture frames nature affects the way it treats it. Additionally, the Biennial explored the idea of framing itself, moving from objects whose insides did not match their outsides, to ideas of consumption (one thing consuming another), to digestion, transformation, death, and decay.
Mario Garcia Torres’s Five Feet High and Rising (2017) consisted of a small wooden shack with drawings, paintings, and photographsall of rivers, a model sailboat, and a recorded lecture that was also given as a performance at the show’s opening. The work was a simple example of the show’s commitment to exploring how nature is framed differently in different cultures. The recorded lecture included song clips from the United States and Mexico. In each, a particular river played a central role. The lecture examined the different ways the songs framed these rivers, in order to approach how rivers exist in each culture.
Ursula Bienmann and Paulo Tavares’s Forest Law (2014) (click for a PDF of the project’s booklet) appeared at the Sao Paulo Biennial before being shown in Sharjah. It fit Sao Paulo’s focus on crisis, specifically environmental crisis, and pointed to the important role that indigenous peoples play resisting it. In Sharjah, surrounded by other works that looked at how nature was framed by different cultures, a viewer’s attention was focused on this aspect of Forest Law. This was an important part of the work, but this reading was less available at the Sao Paulo Biennale, because it was not the show’s overall theme. This was an example of the Sharjah Biennial zeroing in on productive readings. This reading gave extra weight to Forest Law’s argument that we should grant natural objects legal personhood, which the work made from a number of different perspectives, through a two-channel video installation, a myriad of smaller single-channel videos, photographs, and texts. Framing natural objects this way would have important ramifications, it would change the way that we treat nature. Forest Law pointed to sources like the French philosopher Michel Serres’s book The Natural Contract, to Christopher Stone’s 1971 article Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, and to a judge’s dissent to the decision in the 1972 case Sierra Club v. Morton where Stone’s article was cited. In this case, the Sierra Club had filed suit in order to protect a wilderness area, but lost because they were unable to prove that they had standing: that is, they were unable to show that they were directly harmed by Morton’s actions. Proving standing turns out to be a high bar that often prevents environmental groups from using the courts. Granting a natural object legal personhood would make it easier to protect: it would automatically have standing, and impact is the only thing that would have to be shown. But nature would have to be framed differently. Framing is not simply an intellectual exercise, often it carries an emotional charge.
This is apparent when gauging how uncomfortable our culture would be considering a tree or a plant as a person, in spite of having long accorded legal personhood to boats and corporations. For the Kichwa indigenous peoples of Sarayaku, seeing natural objects as people is normal. One of Forest Law’s videos showed a Kichwa witness at a 2011 court case at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights describing their relationship to natural objects. The witness explained that the Kichwa saw the trees and medicine plants as living beings, often considering them members of their own family. When an oil company destroyed a Kichwa sage’s sacred Lispungo tree, a tree that was used for healing, sadness seems to have gripped the sage, killing him, his wife, and two of their children. The witness’ testimony showed the degree of emotive power that framing can hold.
In the same way as it had for Forest Law, the Sharjah Biennial created a productive context for Allora & Calzadilla’s The Great Silence (2014). At the otherwise impressive Achii Triennial, the work, a fictional tale narrated by a parrot, was too easily dismissed as simply an imaginative sci-fi film, in spite of its connection to historical fact. In Sharjah, surrounded by other works that explored how nature was framed by different cultures, the Great Silence’s seriousness was evident. The work, a large three-screen video installation, featured images of parrots and the Arecibo Observatory, which is used to search the universe for intelligent life, and an inter-text which carried the parrots’ narration. The inter-text claimed that in spite of having spent a lot of time and effort searching the universe and having thoroughly studied parrots, humans had failed to grasp that parrots were the intelligent life they sought. The inter-text blamed the way humans frame parrots, concluding that humans will drive parrots to extinction before realizing their folly.
Rain Wu and Eric Chen’s installation, Collectivism (2016) functioned as a lynch pin between the Sharjah Biennial’s concerns with the ways that cultures frame nature and poetic questions about boundaries. Collectivism was a large-scale installation, whose insides were made up of plants that were indigenous to the Emirates. These plants were surrounded by two-meter-high walls made of plastic police shields. The shields pointed to the way nations are used to frame plants, which are often categorized as either local or exotic. By transforming the idea of framing into frames as physical barriers, the show connected the works that looked at how nature was framed by different cultures to a broader concern with framing in general. These works were often interested in challenging their own frames.
Deniz Gül’s Fractals for Light (2016) and Walid Siti’s Phantom Land (2017) physically challenge their own boundaries. Fractals for Light was a lovely work made up of a large pile of sugar with neon tubes that traversed (road like) across and around a pile of sugar, attempting to impose a boundary. This proved futile. The sugar continued to spread outward. Phantom Land functioned in similar ways. A floor-bound, island-shaped abstraction, it consisted of a large flat base with frenzied ribbing branching out in all directions, pushing almost to the object’s edge. Even when the ribbing ended, the base seemed to press onward, pooling seemingly beyond its own bounds. Hana Meletic’s series of knitted wall pieces, Materials, was a work that challenged its own unity. Around their edges, Meletic’s Materials (2015-2017) had rigorous knitted patterns that created an expectation that these small creatures would form a rational whole. When the patterns broke into webs of snarling illogicality I felt for these capricious, self-destructive creatures.
Maria Thereza Alves’s Machine Désirante (Desiring Machine) (2017), and Fehras Publishing Practice’s Soapy Postmodern Bathwater (2017) were works whose contents challenged their frames. Machine Désirante was a series of actual Sharjahanian stamps from the 1960s and 70s reproduced and enlarged into sections of carpet. Stamps are used by countries to establish their own identities, representing a nation’s accomplishments and heroes. But these Sharjahanian stamps featured the Winter Games in France, American cowboys, a portrait of John F. Kennedy, the New York skyline, and the Explorer XII (a satellite launched by NASA), creating a clash between the identity that the stamps represented and the country that produced them—a clash between their content and frame. They pointed to a more contemporary vision of identity, seeing it as the product of desire as opposed to the result of essential truths. Fehras Publishing Practice’s Soapy Postmodern Bathwater functioned in similar ways. It was made up of a camel-shaped metal bookshelf stocked with bilingual English/Arabic art catalogues and a short film. Rejecting the idea that translations create simple equivalences, it explored the productive effects of moving western catalogues to the Middle East into a frame or a context with which, because of their original language, they clash. These bilingual catalogues produced a series of hybrid art terms, marking the incursion of a western art vocabulary into Arabic. Fehras Publishing Practice asks, “Could translation be where the power of one culture over another demonstrates itself in language?” They posit that these hybrid art terms reflect the effects of a global cultural regime that was set up in the wake of 9/11 in the East Mediterranean and North Africa.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Saydnaya (The Missing 19db) (2017) also showed the productive effects that framing can have. Hamdan used framing to make sense of the transformation of Saydnaya (a notorious Syrian prison) into a death camp, in an innovative sound piece and installation that was methodical, rational, and emotionally devastating. Saydnaya was a place of rigorously enforced silence where prisoners are killed for speaking or even coughing. Unable to access the prison, Hamdan created a framework for former prisoners’ experiences, that compared different prisoners’ memories of sound and their muscle memories of whispering, and integrated them with the available information on Saydnaya. Using these memories, he gauged the degree of silence in the prison, which became an index of the jailers’ cruelty. By comparing the level before and after the 2011 uprising, Hamdan concluded that the prisoners’ whispers had become 19 decibels quieter. The decrease in sound tracked with Saydnaya’s transformation into a political prison and the increase in violence that came with it. Added to this rigorous analysis were a number of prisoners’ anecdotes. To survive, their hearing had become so acute that they were able to report on the number of prisoners secretly loaded into trucks and disappeared. By framing prisoners’ experiences, Hamdan told the powerful and disturbing story of Saydnaya, helping viewers digest the facts. But framing did not always have this effect.
At the Sharjah Biennial, Jon Rafman’s works explored our contemporary consumer culture, and how it frames our experience of the world. Along with a number of sculptures from Rafman’s popular series, L’Avalée des Avalés (The Swallower of the Swallowed) (2016), which represented animals swallowing whole other identically sized animals, the Biennale showed an older film, Erysichthon (2015) (click to see the film online), which contextualized the sculptures in terms of the artist’s larger practice. Created from footage found on the internet, Erysichthon started with a metallic cube that was consumed by black goop, then cut to a huge blue eye, and then to a drone operator wearing goggles, with his drone circling around, presumably sending the operator images of himself. These clips expressed the work’s themes, referencing our selfie culture where it is our own lives that are the objects being framed and transformed into objects of consumption. Erysichthon showed clips of snakes eating their own tails, and dinosaurs eating identically sized dinosaurs, whole. But like Rafman’s series of sculptures, these images were about swallowing, not digestion. The film suggests that our consumer culture, focused on the consumption of the self, makes it hard to process our experiences of the world. In Rafman’s works, consumption and framing are not productive.
Christodoulos Panayiotou’s Untitled (2016) contained both the transformations caused by objects framed by consumer culture and those caused by objects buried in the ground. Panayiotou created gold copies of pseudomorphs, embedded them in precious materials to create jewelry, encased them in intricate packaging as luxury items, and had them presented to viewers by a performer enacting the elaborate gestures of high-end sales. These actions focused our attention on a ceremony that was meant to replace our desires with the desires of the salesperson. But this commercial alchemy was performed on objects that had already undergone another type of transformation caused by having been buried for long periods of time. Resting underground for millennia, pseudomorphs, a type of crystal, are forced into the form of another mineral by the pressure of the Earth. This transformation gave them the status of a “false form,” that according to the catalogue was the meaning of their name. And though it was unclear how these different types of transformations fit together in Panayiotou’s work, this shift allowed the Biennial to pivot from looking at the effects of consumer culture to those of burial.
Oscar Murillo’s work Condiciones aún por titular (Conditions yet Unknown) (2014-2017) also shared Panayiotou’s focus on burial and the possibility of transformation. The work was installed in a courtyard where what appeared to have been a brick patio was partially dug up, creating trenches and revealing a sewer system. Spheres rolled around like heads, scales invoked judgment, and paintings functioned like so many corpses. They were draped over sculptures that resembled metal hospital beds of varying heights, hung on racks like meat and lined long trenches like bodies in graves. When it rained, the paintings got soaked, the trenches filled with water, everything seemed to rot. Rotting became another type of transformation, that of the dead. Mochu’s film Cool Memories of Remote Gods (2017) contained a similar commitment to rotting. Employing the sort of visual opacity that was so important to much of the best video work at Documenta 14, the film traveled India’s long abandoned hippie trails, seeing psychedelic culture as the decay of spirituality. This transformation revealed the machinery beneath, showing, as the film tells us, the way that spirituality made men into man-machine hybrids.
Elements of burial and the underground continued in Shaadi Habeb Allah’s dark and surreal film and installation, 30kg Shine (2017). Set in Jerusalem, the film’s many strands were brought together by a ghost story told through an inter-text at the end of the film. In it, the illusion of spiritual possession was used to cover up a crime. The film showed an older woman who inhabited her family home like a thief, 22,000 corpses that were dispossessed of their original burial site and reburied in a tunnel under Jerusalem, and the Palestinian workers who worked with these corpses, only able to enter Jerusalem because of their jobs. 30kg Shine suggested that beneath the ideas of possession and dispossession lurked an illusion, a ghost story, that allowed for a certain form of theft.
Similarly, Inci Eviner’s fictional film, Beuys Underground (2017) used the idea of the underground metaphorically. In the film, the underground stood for a form of political resistance. It focused on the ideas of framing and transformation, and pitted a group of poets and artists against a repressive government which had removed all points of reference, or any means for its citizens to define their own lives. Borrowing ideas from art, and leaning on Joseph Beuys’s emphasis on art’s capacity to heal society, the group set out to create a framework for themselves by defining a series of new terms. They used textual descriptions and mini performance-like actions set on an unchanging background that represented an underground complex. The background gave the sprawling 4K single-channel video the quality of a drawing. Hopeful in dark times, Beuys Underground contained the same sort of silliness as much of the best performance art, and offered the possibility that the creative class could be a force of resistance.
The Sharjah Biennial’s main theme, framing, particularly the framing of nature, compelled different and closer readings of a number of well-known projects. Its approach to this theme was poetic, giving the show the fluidity to make sense of many works in a number of different registers, and allowing it to extend and transform the idea of framing in beautiful and interesting ways.
© Vincent Pruden