Dates: 6 February to 15 June 2025
Space: Sharjah Art Foundation
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?
M'barek Bouhchichl
Our voices are wounded, 2024
40 ceramic vessels
Dimensions variable
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
Courtesy of the artist
'La poésie ne doit pas périr. Car alors, où serait l'espoir du Monde' Léopold Sédar Senghor
2023
Assembled, stained and engraved wood, marble
Various dimensions
Courtesy of the artist and Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis
Constructing a decolonial archive of intertwined material and literary cultures, M'barek Bouhchichi focuses on embodied histories and liberatory poetics of Blackness in his homeland, Morocco, and other regions of North Africa. Our voices are wounded (2024) assembles 40 vessels recalling ancient pottery used for carrying and storing water. Representing different civilisations and eras, these ceramic works are engraved with poetic fragments in minoritised languages, pressing against colonial monolingualism and the violence of empires. The seven works from 'La poésie ne doit pas périr. Car alors, où serait l'espoir du Monde' Léopold Sédar Senghor ['Poetry must not perish. For then, what would be the hope of the world?' Léopold Sédar Senghor] (2023) are inspired by the writing of the Senegalese poet, thinker and political leader quoted in the title.
Bouhchichi transforms the tribulum, an ancient agricultural implement for threshing grains, into a slate for the inscription of revolutionary Tunisian poetry in Braille, invoking the persistence of haptic memory and the power of opacity against the blindness of imperial history.
- Arushi Vats
Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz.
