On June 24, the Sharjah Art Foundation announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento will co-curate the 17th Sharjah Biennial, which is set to open in January 2027.

Harutyunyan, a professor of contemporary art and theory at the Berlin University of the Arts, brings extensive experience from across Europe; her research interests include post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality, and curatorial theory. Previously, she co-curated “This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time” at Amsterdam’s Stedlijk Museum Bureau in 2014. She is also one of the founding editors of ARTMargins (MIT Press), and the author of The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the ‘painterly real’ 1987-1994 (Manchester University Press, 2017).

Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda. Her work explores interdisciplinary methodologies with a focus on contemporary readings of historical themes in and around Africa and the Global South. She has led numerous international curatorial projects, including the 6th and 7th editions of the Lubumbashi Biennial in Congo, the 14th African Biennale of Photography in Bamako, and the Angola Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In Lisbon, she currently serves as a curatorial advisor to the Hangar Centre of Artistic Research and a member of the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian’s acquisitions committee. 

Looking ahead to the 2027 edition, Haruryunyan noted her interest in "examin[ing] the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.” Meanwhile, drawing on her architectural background, Nascimento aims to explore “art’s capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations.”

Further details about the exhibition program and artist line-up will be announced at a later date.

Sanle Yan is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.