Invoking the Past to Redefine the Now at Sharjah Biennial 16
There’s an emerging tendency in recent biennials that sees contemporary art being used to revisit, revive and preserve ancestral memory, ancient wisdom and rituals—intimate, human stories tethered to places dramatically altered by historical forces. As artists begin to look more often inward, backward and laterally in response to the chaotic, looming pressures of globalized modernity and moments of seismic transition, contemporary art has taken on the role of a vessel carrying cultural heritage and identity from the past into an uncertain future.
This impulse is especially evident in the 2025 Sharjah Biennial, pointedly titled “to carry” and curated by a deliberately diverse group: Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz. Each curator has shaped an individual selection and narrative, which at times overlap or intertwine in a consciously polyphonic and open-ended proposition. Staged across multiple venues and featuring more than 190 artists, “to carry” confronts today’s precarious global condition by asking what persists when people flee, migrate, or push forward under the crushing forces of progress and historical rupture—what endures of the stories, traditions and inherited traumas they carry. In the face of such dislocations, the artworks become embodied historiographies: living containers of memory, resistance and reinvention.
This effort to protect underserved, overlooked and frequently obscured histories animates many of the works at Sharjah Biennial, which has long demonstrated how contemporary art can not only spark speculative futures but also unearth, interrogate and safeguard the past: a living repository of knowledge and experience.
Since its inception, the Sharjah Biennial Foundation has played a pivotal role in protecting and reactivating the UAE’s historical architecture and cultural legacy by transforming heritage sites into venues for contemporary art. In doing so, it preserves these irreplaceable architectural structures from the erasures of rapid real estate development while fostering an ongoing dialogue between past and present. The Biennial helps ensure that traditional buildings are not lost but remain vital to community life, renewed with each edition through fresh narratives and ideas.
Take, for instance, the Sharjah Art Foundation’s main building in Al Mureijah Square, a historic district in Sharjah. The architecture is a deliberate synthesis of old and new: original coral stone walls—traditionally used in Gulf-region homes known as “baits” to protect against the heat—have been carefully preserved and restored. These traditional structures now frame a contemporary design that integrates six gallery spaces of varying sizes, all connected by courtyards, alleyways and open squares, forming a dynamic and responsive platform for contemporary exhibitions.
Not far from Al Mureijah, the Sharjah Biennial has also reactivated the Bank Street Building, which this edition houses two works, including Isaac Julien’s LOML (2022), a poetic, non-narrative meditation on grief. The Foundation acquired this modernist structure as part of its wider effort to preserve the Al Shuwaiheen district, recognizing these now largely disused buildings as architectural remnants of Sharjah’s 1970s economic optimism, spurred by the discovery of oil.
Another iconic site now brought into the fold of the Biennial is the Flying Saucer—an audacious piece of 1970s modernist architecture that fuses space-age fantasy with Brutalist heft. Built between 1974 and 1978, the structure features a circular dome upheld by eight V-shaped columns and a star-shaped canopy that radiates outward from a panoramic façade. Originally conceived as a multi-use venue, it underwent a series of transformations over the decades, functioning variously as a supermarket and a fast-food joint. In 2012, the Sharjah Art Foundation acquired the building and launched a meticulous restoration led by architect Mona El Mousfy of SpaceContinuum Design Studio, eventually reintroducing it in 2020 as an active community art center.
For this Biennial, the space is inhabited by a sound work by Mara TK that floods the environment, guiding visitors into intergalactic realms through frequencies rooted in Māori traditions of lunar connection, fluidly interlaced with contemporary rhythms, including hip-hop. This sensorial immersion finds a visual counterpoint in Indigenous Australian artist Daniel Boyd’s intimate paintings, which juxtapose ancestral symbology with contemporary aesthetics. His signature dot motifs, invoking historical opacity and the politics of visibility, stretch beyond the canvas to cover the Flying Saucer’s windows, transforming the building into a living membrane between past and present.
Contemporary art as a vessel for memory, myth, and identity
When viewed within the broader context of today’s global society, the turn many contemporary artists are making toward the past—reviving ancestral traditions and inherited forms—reflects a growing desire to anchor identity in layered temporality. It offers a counterpoint to the flattening, homogenizing forces of globalization. This artistic response opens space for more nuanced, place-based understandings of the human condition, where cultural specificity resists the erasure wrought by accelerated, placeless modernity. In this light, engaging with the past is not a retreat into nostalgia, but a dynamic act of critical re-evaluation and reinterpretation—one that insists on the living relevance of historical narratives within the evolving present.
At the same time, by surfacing marginalized or forgotten histories, contemporary art allows for a deeper, multifaceted articulation of cultural identity from a more universal vantage point. It resists the slow erosion of memory, fostering continuity across generations while revealing hidden resonances and symbolic codes that reverberate across geographies and cultural frameworks.
Consider again the Sharjah Art Foundation, where numerous artists and collectives explore the potential of art as a repository and vessel—a means of carrying sacred ancestral knowledge, ancient rituals and disappearing familial or collective memories through time. These works embrace fluidity and transformation, as inherited forms are recontextualized within a multilingual, multicultural flow of exchange—one that defines our present and confronts us with shared crises and urgent questions.
Puerto Rican artist Jose Gonzalez Santos, for example, reanimates ancient artisanal techniques and communal rituals to explore how ancestral knowledge is embedded in material culture through apprenticeship and self-organized learning. Installed in a historic section of the building—its coral stone walls holding the quiet trace of centuries—the artist restages a series of processes and collaborative methodologies rooted in Taíno culture. Through these acts, he taps into the alchemical and transformative potential of materials, rendering them portals to other temporal and spiritual dimensions.
Similarly, Māori artist Michael Parekōwhai brings to Sharjah a handcrafted red piano—at once a material and sonic vessel for the transmission of ancestral knowledge. Surrounding the piano, a constellation of contemporary plastic clocks rendered in a vintage aesthetic echoes its motifs, deepening the dialogue between knowledge and time. The work blurs boundaries between artifact and fiction, ritual and repetition, presence and trace.
Storytelling serves as a central axis of this Biennial, as artists draw from the past to imagine speculative alternatives or envision possible futures for humanity. In this context, Monira Al Qadiri’s suspended, oversized shells engage in a poetic, intimate exchange with excerpts from Thani Al Suwaidi’s writings. Together, they expose how tributyltin pollution has caused an involuntary process of gender transformation, halting the species’ ability to reproduce. Nearby, Filipino artist Stephanie Comilang presents an expansive multimedia narrative tracing the disappearing tradition of pearl diving, once linking the Arabian Gulf, the Philippines and China. Her projection unfolds across a conventional screen and an enormous curtain of pearls, further complicating the layered, multi-perspectival nature of the narrative it tells.
This practice of reviving and preserving the past through contemporary media appears as a deliberate fusion of ancient heritage, collapsing past, present and future into a single artifact—an object that functions simultaneously as remnant and premonition. Claudia Martínez Garay weaves pre-Columbian symbologies and cosmologies into her textiles, confronting the persistent shadow of colonial bias while offering hybridity as the only viable counter-narrative.
SEE ALSO: Channeling the Primordial Pulse of Nature: An Interview With Artist Thalita Hamaoui
This meditation on authenticity and hybridization—and the urgent challenge of transmitting cultural and linguistic knowledge across generations—finds further resonance in the curatorial approach at Calligraphy Square. Here, textiles are positioned as alternative systems of coding, repositories of shared knowledge inscribed not only in their imagery but also in their materiality and production: as lexicon, map and ritual space.
At the entrance, a generational dialogue between two Indonesian artists unfolds. Citra Sasmita’s dense symbolism intersects with the more traditional visual language absorbed by her mentor, Mangku Muriati—the only woman to inherit the Kamasan painting technique, passed down by her father, Mangku Wayan Suda and rooted in Hindu epics and temple iconography. In Timur Merah Project XV: Poetry of the Sea, Vow of the Sun, both artists preserve the codified visual grammar of Kamasan—flat perspective, natural pigments and stylized mythological figures—while subtly expanding its scope to address contemporary themes such as gender, political violence and cultural survival. Within these works, heritage and trauma intertwine with acts of healing and restoration, transforming the pieces into a living archive where ritual and storytelling are passed on through embodied practice.
The notion that materials can bear cultural and political weight or hold the imprint of historical trauma is powerfully embodied in the work of Bangladeshi artist Reetu Sattar, who examines the colonial economic and societal consequences of the erasure of Bengal’s muslin. Once a coveted textile widely produced and exported during the Mughal Empire, muslin’s production was abruptly disrupted under British colonial rule. The trauma of this cultural rupture and the inequities of imperial trade relations are embedded in the material language of the textile itself—a tradition severed at its knots, yet kept alive through contemporary artistic practice.
In the same section, Maria José Murillo—of mixed European and Indigenous American heritage—blends handcraft and digital techniques to trace a layered history of cultural resilience and hybridization. Pre-Columbian Peruvian patterns appear intricately woven across digitally produced textile surfaces, forming a palimpsest of languages and visual histories that reflect the multiplicity of culture today.
Similarly confronting the pressures of globalization is Yogyakarta-based artist Dian Suci Rahmawati, who, in Bait Obaid Al Shamsi facing Sharjah’s port, investigates the impact of trade on the lives of Javanese women laborers. Their underpaid, artisanal work in remote regions operates as an invisible extension of global industry. Through Rahmawati’s research, embodied knowledge and inherited techniques—particularly weaving and wood carving—emerge as both archive and asset, empowering communities to not only survive but assert agency within a globalized economy.
At times, art becomes a means of reentering history to construct new counter-narratives, as in the work of Salima Hakim, who addresses the historical invisibility of women in archaeology. In Her Cabinet of Curiosity (2024), intricately embroidered narrative objects honor imagined archaeological discoveries and fossils of Homo floresiensis—the oldest known woman, believed to have lived between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago on the island of Flores, Indonesia. These fabric replicas challenge the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge systems and affirm the generative potential of female epistemologies.
Other artists, meanwhile, turn to the sonic realm, reviving ancestral rituals, songs and dances through contemporary performance—traditions at risk of vanishing as historical migration and displacement fracture their transmission across generations. These themes are central to the work of London-based Sierra Leonean artist Julianknxx, who has issued open calls across nine European cities, inviting Black communities to participate in performances centered on the revival of cultural inheritance and the reawakening of memory. In his compelling seven-channel video Daughters at the Rim of the Silver Seas (2025), a young woman dances along the seashore of Marseille, confronting the vastness of the Mediterranean through the rhythmic pulse of her movements, dressed in her grandmother’s traditional garments. Her dance becomes a ritual of healing and reconnection, stitching together the fragmented geographies and temporalities of diasporic experience—a gesture at once intimate and monumental, seeking to mend the existential dislocation of living between multiple histories and uprooted places.
Similarly, in Boundaries of the Dreaming Body: Tajliba (2025), Saudi-based but Iraqi-born artist Tara Al Dughaither explores maternally inherited memories of southern Iraqi dance, songs and legends. Presented through video and multimedia composition, the work functions as both an archive and a restaging of traditions on the brink of disappearance. Drawing from her research into the music and movement practices of communities along the Shatt Al Arab River bordering Iraq and Iran, Al Dughaither approaches contemporary art as a hybrid mode of archaeology, performance and embodied memory—reviving ancestral knowledge through the body itself. Her practice becomes a way to remind both body and soul how to carry the echoes of memory and the wisdom encoded within them, spiritually and genetically.
In Liu Chung’s sci-fi-inflected video Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony II (2023), it is instead an imagined alien entity that attempts to study humanity through its sonic traditions, identifying human singing as one of its oldest technologies. The work interlaces polyphonic vocalizations with critical reflections on mineral extractivism and the exploitative systems surrounding the lithium trade—an element increasingly essential to the infrastructure of contemporary human life. In this speculative excavation, sound emerges as both a tool of communication and a space of critique.
The notion of artistic practice as an archival act of memory becomes especially resonant in the project Photo Kegham. The photographic archive of Kegham Djieghalian Sr.—once the most celebrated photographer in mid-20th-century Gaza—transports viewers into a forgotten reality of modernity and multicultural life in what is now one of the world’s most contested and conflict-ridden regions. Revisited through the dual lens of artistic inquiry and counter-historical intervention, these images—found in three dusty boxes by his grandson, Kegham Djieghalian Jr., in a family home in Cairo—offer a deeply personal entry point into fragmented family memory. By engaging Gaza’s past through these intimate visual records, the younger Djieghalian generates new semantics and speculative narratives that complicate and challenge dominant representations. “Unmaking the archive” through contemporary art reanimates those faces and moments, granting them not only historical weight but also a broader, more poetic register of meaning.
“to carry” becomes a site for innumerable rituals of preservation and interpretation—for memories and stories that might otherwise vanish. If the idea of “contemporary art,” from the avant-garde onward, has often been framed as a rupture with the past—a forward-leaning stance toward futurity—then the emotional and spiritual alienation wrought by today’s hyper-accelerated, information-saturated global society is shifting that trajectory. Artists are now increasingly compelled to look back, to reengage with the symbolic and spiritual value of ancestral traditions and wisdom deeply rooted in a sense of place and shaped by the reciprocal ecologies of community and nature. These practices perform a kind of recalibration—seeking once again a sense of in locus, an embodied form of presence that is not merely physical, but existential and symbolic.
As globalization continues to dissolve geographic boundaries, artists are rediscovering—and in some cases reclaiming from their ancestors—the understanding that being in locus is a state of mind more than one of location. A grounded psyche is at home wherever it moves, sustained by relational bonds to land and community—bonds that the violent pace of political, economic and technological upheaval has often fractured.
At the same time, many of these practices appear to reach toward what mythological and religious structures once offered: frameworks for grappling with archetypal truths. The symbols and stories of myth and religion have long acted as vessels—containers that allow the conscious mind to access, interpret and hold timeless, essential knowledge. This is something advertisers and media architects intuitively grasp: the ability to manipulate desire and fear by invoking these fractured symbolic systems. But the erosion of our connection to ancient epistemologies—those rooted in relational systems and ecological awareness—carries a subtle yet catastrophic risk. For what is no longer held and protected by shared symbolic language or ritual inevitably burdens the psyche, falling into a void where no common structure remains to transmit its truths across generations.
In this context, the practice of Brazilian artist Luana Vitra becomes especially resonant. Her work not only engages with but fully surrenders to the symbolic, political and economic meanings embedded in materials—particularly minerals—positioning them within the human circuits of extraction and toxic relationality that have suspended the possibility of deeper spiritual or magical dimensions. In Vitra’s installations, minerals reclaim their agency as both spiritual and political forces. These are no longer inert resources, but ritual objects—activated sites of resistance that challenge the logic of productivity and transparency. Even audiences dulled by what Byung-Chul Han defines as the self-exploiting, achievement-driven subject of burnout society may begin to perceive these charged materials as portals to a counterlogic, a counterdimension. Here, the mineral emerges not as a commodity, but as remnant and witness—attuned to geological time, expansive energy cycles and cosmic resonance, reorienting us toward a deeper temporal sensibility that transcends the contingency of individual lives.
The Sharjah Biennial, in its scale and multiplicity, resists any singular narrative or resolution. Rather than offering answers, it opens necessary portals, gesturing toward ancient truths and values that have long hovered at the threshold of disappearance. These truths, given space to sediment, begin to crystallize anew—embodied in contemporary artworks that carry them forward, much like archaeological finds once did. This is not only for future generations but also for an audience that is increasingly in search of meaning across fractured geographies and shifting cultural terrains.
Perhaps, then, the search for a single thread—some neat, conclusive throughline—should be abandoned. Within this chorus of voices and visions, it is polyphony itself that becomes the guide: an invitation to reconnect with something deeper, something that resists the univocal readings imposed by dominant political, cultural and economic systems.
Ultimately, the Sharjah Biennial becomes a profound exercise in rehumanization within a contracting cultural landscape. It raises the question of what it means “to carry a home,” “to carry a history,” “to carry language”—but also “to carry a wound,” “to carry equatorial heat,” “to carry songs,” “to carry soul,” “to carry resistance.” To carry Te Pō—the (new) beginnings.
Just as ancient rituals once brought communities together to process grief and the passage of time, biennials like Sharjah today function as modern rituals—staging plural temporalities, recovering silenced voices and enabling symbolic regeneration. The question that then emerges is whether contemporary art—especially in the wake of the pandemic rupture—might now offer this vital space to revisit inherited memories and collective traumas, not merely to recover them, but to distill from them a universal reflection on the fast-evolving nature of human existence. One rooted not only in geopolitical or economic relations to others, but also in connection to otherworldly dimensions, allowing us to begin transcending the contingencies of the everyday and of linear time itself. A biennial like Sharjah invites us to contemplate not only multiple temporalities, but a pluriverse of meanings—one that may ultimately yield a more symbolic, more enduring understanding of what it means to exist in the world today.
From there, a final consideration emerges: is contemporary art—especially in the aftermath of the pandemic rupture—now offering a vital space to revisit the past, to engage with inherited memories and traumas, in order to extract, or at least gesture toward, universal truths about the fast-evolving nature of human existence? Not solely in relation to others, as geopolitics and economics so often dictate, but in relation to other-worthy dimensions—those capable of allowing us to transcend not only the contingencies of the everyday, but also of the now and then.
Is contemporary art, then, increasingly becoming the vessel for these symbols and images—functioning as carriers of archetypal weight—at a moment when humanity is not only recovering from a pandemic-induced hemorrhage of symbolic tools, but facing a deeper, more systemic absence of resources with which to confront a layered, shifting reality? A reality that resists containment by any rational or linguistic system and instead calls for a symbolic language capacious enough to hold its complexity.
Sharjah Biennial 16 runs through June 15 at several historical sites in Sharjah, UAE.
