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Sharjah’s must-see art showcase explores identity and freedom

Sharjah Art Foundation's ongoing exhibitions devoted to the radical works of Emily Karaka and Bouchra Khalili carry a powerful message for the fragmented contemporary world of today

Published: Thu 12 Sep 2024, 9:06 PM

Updated: Thu 12 Sep 2024, 9:06 PM

  • By
  • Shaikh Ayaz

Amid the silence of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s numerous galleries at the historic intersection of the Al Mureijah Square, Bouchra Khalili’s works whisper stories of invisibilised identities, civil liberty, stateless communities, the dilemma of migrants and what the artist herself describes as “radical citizenship”. Based in Vienna, Khalili is of Moroccan-French descent and her recently opened solo show, Between Circles and Constellations, is part of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s ambitious autumn line-up that also includes an exhibition devoted to Emily Karaka, a notable figure in New Zealand’s post-modern expressionism movement.

Inaugurated by Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, member of the Federal Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, these two major exhibitions will set the stage for other upcoming showcases featuring well-known masters such as William Kentridge and Antonio Dias.


Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, director and president of the Sharjah Art Foundation, along with Amal Al Ali and Meera Madhu, Between Circles and Constellations brings together a remarkable snapshot of the Morocco-born Khalili’s most significant projects from the last two decades, including the regional premiere of her recent film The Public Storyteller (2024). One of the unmissable highlights of the show is The Circle.

This mixed media installation starts from a forgotten historical event — the candidacy of Djellali Kamal, an undocumented Maghrebi worker during the French presidential elections of 1974. “The piece is essentially a meditation through oral poetry, film and performance on the notion of belonging and community in which I invite viewers to imagine a world where an anonymous undocumented worker can be elected president,” says Khalili, hoping that the artwork will give rise to an emancipatory conception of community from purely poetic gestures.


While The Public Storyteller reimagines Djellali’s campaign as an epic by a Moroccan Bard, the ‘Circles’ in the show’s title refer to al halqa, a traditional Moroccan storytelling practice in which people across generations gather in a circle and share memories and political ideas. In Khalili’s deft hands, the circle formed by the audience “becomes a metaphor for the community brought together by the act of envisaging a better future in a shared world,” explains Hoor, who was recently named the artistic director of the 25th Biennale of Sydney, to be held in 2026.

Between Circles and Constellations serves as a reminder to document and account for stories of collective emancipation and collective healing. However, Khalili, whose video projections The Mapping Journey Project drew widespread acclaim at the Venice Biennale 2024, refrains from interpreting her work solely as a commentary on migration or colonial and post-colonial narratives. “In fact, all of my works are connected to each other through the very question that has been haunting my practice from the beginning — how can we rethink forms of belonging freed from restrictive conceptions of identity?” says Khalili, who is no stranger to Sharjah’s artistic landscape.

She has previously exhibited at Sharjah Biennale 10 in 2011 and Sharjah Biennale 15 in 2023. “The amazing programmes and the wonderful team at the Sharjah Art Foundation makes Sharjah a very special place to me,” gushes the artist who has also participated prominently in two editions of the March Meeting, an annual artistic convention organised by the Sharjah Art Foundation where experts from around the globe engage in meaningful dialogue on relevant topics in contemporary art.

The life and times of Emily Karaka — currently 72 and based in Auckland — tells a different story, though her colourful abstractions are no less powerful as they dwell on the fraught legacy of colonialism and its ongoing impact on Māori identity and culture. Being the first major exhibition of Karaka’s work internationally, there are plenty that art enthusiasts can discover here.

Titled Ka Awatea, A New Dawn, the sprawling Karaka survey displays works drawn from public and private collections spanning her five-decade career. The artist is also showing new works commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation. “Stylistically diverse, from high intensity abstract expressionist paintings in saturated colour, to poetic representations of land and people, her artwork carries messages of Māori sovereignty, social justice, care for the environment and love for her family. Born of the politics of colonisation, her work is personal, passionate and anchored in Māori rights related to the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand,” says Hoor, who has co-curated this show along with Megan Tamati-Quennell (a co-curator of the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 16).

Inspiration

Tamati-Quennell, who is of Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Mutunga, Taranaki, Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe and Waitaha heritage, tells wknd. that Karaka descends from the many Māori tribes of Auckland and the surrounding areas. Born in 1952 in Auckland, Karaka began painting in her early 20s. “Though she is largely self-taught, she cites a number of leading New Zealand painters as being influential in relationship to her artistic development, including the modernist painter Colin McCahon. She credits her family including her grandparents and many tribal leaders for her political awareness and development,” notes Tamati-Quennell.

Renowned for its world-class curatorial approach, the Sharjah Art Foundation has played a pivotal role in linking Arab cultural histories to the global art scene and vice-versa — thanks to all the exciting programming it’s been whipping up year after year since its inception in 2009. Both Between Circles and Constellations and Ka Awatea, A New Dawn attest to the institution’s tireless efforts in bringing unique artistic experiences to Sharjah, with a particular focus on serving its local communities and population and reflecting the Gulf’s own rich cultural diversity and varied history.

Besides successfully fostering connections between the Arab art world and the international community, Hoor has been at the forefront of turning Sharjah into a global art hub. She’s passionate about restoring heritage buildings and ultimately, transforming the abandoned units into art and culture centres. The Al Mureijah Square is one such space. The former residential neighbourhood was rebooted by the Sharjah Art Foundation to create art spaces including a film screening venue. The foundation also manages art hubs in Bait Al Serkal and Al Hamriyah, a coastal haven close to Sharjah city. Come September end and the institution is all set to host two more stellar shows at these venues. At Al Hamriyah Studios (designed by Emirati architect Khaled Al Najjar) in Al Hamriyah, visitors can catch Antonio Dias: The Search for an Open Enigma — a show that explores Dias’ category-defying tendencies through a vast selection of works that encompass his artistic trajectory from its beginnings in the 1960s until the early 2000s. The first exhibition to focus solely on pioneering South African artist William Kentridge’s theatre practice, A Shadow of a Shadow (at Bait Al Serkal) promises to bring together performances created by Kentridge from the late 1980s to the present, starting from his interpretations of King Ubu — the outrageous protagonist from Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896) — and Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute down to Kentridge’s own original works such as The Head and the Load (2018) about Africa and Africans in World War I. “William Kentridge’s practice encompasses theatrical, musical, and operatic projects with visual components that appear and reappear in different articulations. Centering around the human condition, his multifaceted imagery is often interwoven with the social, political, and economic realities of South Africa,” says Tarek Abou El Fetouh, director of the performance department and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation.

A historical influence

The title of the exhibition is drawn from a play by 13th-century Arab playwright and puppeteer Ibn Daniyal, who fled Iraq to escape Mongol invasions. El Fetouh adds, “Prompted by the sense that the world was ending, Ibn Daniyal created shadow plays that ridiculed authorities and exposed corrupt social mores, tropes that would appear again centuries later in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Kentridge’s adaptation of Ubu. While nodding to Kentridge’s predilection for shadow plays and puppet theatre, A Shadow of a Shadow also pays homage to his incisive political rebuke of authoritarianism through absurdist satire and theatricality. Together, the works selected for this exhibition speak to the artist’s ongoing critique of social constructs, power structures and the colonial project’s metamorphic manifestations.”

Between Circles and Constellations and Ka Awatea, A New Dawn are on view at Al Mureijah Art Spaces, Sharjah until December 1; A Shadow of a Shadow and Antonio Dias: The Search for an Open Enigma will open on September 28.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com


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