Sharjah Biennial 16
to carry
Various locations 

What does it mean to bear the weight of sociopolitical histories, ancestral knowledge, and collective memory? How do we transmute the gaping wounds of intergenerational grief and trauma into active, forward-looking modes of healing and resistance—especially as the world continues to sink into anthropogenic crises, with seemingly no salvation in sight?

Such dire concerns pervaded the 16th Sharjah Biennial (SB16), which opened on February 6, shortly after US President Donald Trump announced his disturbing plans to “take over” the Gaza Strip. The shocking proposal was partly drowned by the never-ending reportage about wars, economic downturns, and environmental disasters in today’s media landscape, but it set the stage for an art event dedicated to challenging the Western world order. 

This endeavor began in 2003, when Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi took charge of the longest-running international art exhibition in the wider Gulf region. Previously, the event centered on Islamic art, but Al Qasimi was determined to revamp old biennial formulas. “No more country representation that divided artists into a handful of national pavilion-like booths,” she declared in a recent interview with The Korea Times, “and no more having the show in a trade center.” Under that directive, and the enigmatic theme “to carry,” SB16 unfurled across more than a dozen venues in the emirate, including museums, heritage sites, vacant buildings, villages, and even desert terrain. With 650 works by nearly 200 artists of different backgrounds, the event explored cultural narratives and ways of living with “multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures,” as the curatorial statement explained.