Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber (SB14), questions the possibilities and purpose of producing art when history is increasingly fictionalised, when ideas of “society” are invariably displaced, when borders and beliefs are under constant renegotiation, and our material culture is under the constant threat of human destruction and climate degradation.
SB14 will feature exhibitions by curators Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons, bringing together a range of experiences and works—including major commissions, large-scale public installations, performances, and films—to explore how contemporary life, enabled by rapid technological change, has created a seemingly inescapable “echo chamber” of information, complex personal networks, and shifting narratives that are physical, spiritual, and virtual.
On view in SAF buildings and courtyards across the city’s arts and heritage areas, as well as other spaces in Sharjah, Leaving the Echo Chamber will explore subjects ranging from migration and diaspora, to concepts of time and interpreted histories, in relation to today’s continuous loop of mediated information. Invited to respond to the overarching issues and concerns of Leaving the Echo Chamber, the curators will present three distinct exhibitions, for which they have invited a selection of artists from around the world, as well as from the UAE and the surrounding region, to participate.
An initial selection of participating artists in each of the three exhibitions follows below with the complete lineup to be announced in the coming months:
Look for Me All Around You, curated by Claire Tancons
Look for Me All Around You questions if obscurity is the harbinger of futurity, darkness the site of seeing, and blackness the scene of unmasking. In Look for Me All Around You, what is being “looked for” is not what is being “looked at”—if only it could be seen. Standing witness to the imperilment of the contemporary in the atomised space between “me” and “you,” Look for Me All Around You seeks to eschew the sole realm of the retinal embedded within hegemonic structures of looking, learning, and feeling. It strives instead, through mechanisms of repossession of perception, to reflect and deflect encroaching conditions of dispossession and diasporisation.
Look for Me All Around You will include works by Caline Aoun, Aline Baiana, Nikolaus Gansterer, Eisa Jocson, Isabel Lewis, Ulrik López, Carlos Martiel and Wu Tsang.
(more info here)