Review of Sharjah Biennale 2015 -The Past, The Present, The Possible

Sharjah Biennial 2015-

the past, the present, the possible

The past decade has produced a fresh crop of biennials from Berlin to Istanbul,India to Hong Kong and Vienna to Sao Paolo.The art on show is only part of the answer. Enlisting a string of good artists simply isn't enough. Something else has to happen - a conversation between the different works so that it is not just a sum of parts but establishes a cohesive, big picture.This is where the 12th Sharjah Biennial (March-June 2015) fell short.

 Curator Eungie Joo promised in her words “a meditative pause to reassert the need for wonder" and a reflection on Sharjah's “ambitions, possibilities, and being." Spread over a number of venues by the Sharjah harbour, the biennial merely touched upon these goals.The biennial has, since its launch in 1993, quietly provided a crucial platform for contemporary artists in the conservative enclaves of the Middle East.  with a record of critical acclaim accumulated by some of the previous editions—most recently, by the  gritty 11th biennial curated by Yuko Hasegawa.

It's not as if there is not much to talk about. But many subjects associated with the UAE's past and present—the value of labor, human and women's rights, or the stronghold of religion on all aspects of civil life—are simply taboo topics to discuss. As anyone who works in the Middle East knows, one has to play by the rules of the region. Sharjah ruler Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi made this abundantly clear a couple of editions ago, when he dismissed Jack Persekian the long standing artistic director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, widely credited for the biennial's curatorial success for failing to censor a controversial political installation by Algerian artist Mustapha Benfodil deemed blasphemous.In such a context, there is only one way to play it:safe. Many of the works, were individually poetic and contemplative in nature, and yet within all this serenity something was lacking and something fell flat. It was perhaps too safe.Several international heavyweights from the MENESA region were invited to respond to Sharjah for this 12th edition and focused on UAE's most obvious aspects:dunes, exotic animals and fragrances.

 Abraham Cruzvillegas provided a new perch for the tamed birds of prey he encountered at the local market. Rirkrit Tiravanija 's  imagination was fire by a rosewater distillery he saw at Sharjah 's Museum of Islamic Civilizations.He commissioned a replica, and built an entire installation around it, complete with Arabic rosegarden. chefs to cook rosewater based delicacies and comfortable seats to consume them on.This ensemble is as pleasant as it is inoffensive.Most of the artists featured were associated with the curator over many years , stuck to what they do best. These are more safe options, which produced enjoyable—if familiar—stand alone presentations, displayed in their own independent space. Joo's long-time collaborator Danh Vo reconstructed a part of another of his gigantic Statue of Liberty; painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye continued her series of fictional portraits. The 90-year-old Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan, created tapestries of semi-abstract landscapes she is famous for.

 
A few artists llike Cinthia Marcelle dared to push the envelope, with a subtle , but hard hitting installation. Set in one of the outdoor spaces located in maze-like Sharjah Heritage Area, At The Risk of the Real (2015) resembled a semi-derelict house, depleted by sand. Instead of a roof overhead, there were only large squares of mesh suspended between planks. Men dressed as laborers stepped on them at carefully orchestrated intervals, shaking off sand that landed in the eyes of the visitors. This temporarily blinded them to the uncomfortable vision of these men toiling in the heat of the strong sun, like on so many building sites around the Emirate.

Rayyane Tabet 's  monumental Steel Ring (2013) installed at an entire wing of the Sharjah Art Museum, was both visually arresting and conceptually strong. The line of steel rings replicated a section of the pipe built in 1946 to transport oil from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, and across Jordan and Syria. Each ring was engraved with its geographical coordinates, thus tracing an arc of conflict in the terrain it covered, from the Six-Day War to the Syrian Civil War. This work attempted to connect three warring countries and resonated with longing for an era prior to political and geographical harmony.

The strongest works of the biennial were those that incorporated elements of the local context indirectly instead of offering a direct response. For instance, Taro Shinoda's desert-inspired Japanese garden karesansui (2015)  used local materials, more specifically sand, to construct a dry landscape garden. As the wind blew, the craters in the sand deeped and demostrated the slow passage of time. Damián Ortega made physical and communication boundaries in his porous architectural sound piece Talking Wall (2015), which was based on the fossilised coral walls he encountered in the Heritage Area in Sharjah. The set of three low, curved walls with interconnected openings bored into them functioned simultaneously as speaking and hearing holes, yet also acted as barriers. As such, the piece was wonderfully contradictory: the walls invited an openness of communication, but only worked if interlocutors stood apart at a distance. Rheim Alkadhi's subtle ,evocative gesture of collecting eyelashes of sea labourers who work along the Sharjah Creek and fixing them together on a metal strip to make up a strand of eyelashes constituted a powerful piece. With every eyelash a different narrative, and literally a point of view,  connected to the other. We can only imagine how unsettling the artist's initial conversations with these labourers must have been and how a bond of trust must have grown for the labourers to agree to donate something as personal and intimate as an eyelash. The frailness of this exchange is scripted in the fragility of the work. Adrian Villar Rojas stationed his team of carpenters, metal workers and artisans in the abandoned ice factory in the east-coast city of Kalba for two months to develop a massive installation using range of plants, shells, rocks, dead birds, trash and bones collected in the UAE. The detritus were layered with cement to construct towering rectangular columns to convey a sense of mortality, loss and decay.   These pieces were  examples of how  material specificity found in Sharjah could be translated into a more universal comment.

.

But these exciting pieces were exceptions in an otherwise disjointed ,mellow, inward looking, offering. 

Abraham Cruzvillegas "Here We Stand" 2015

Rirkrit Tiravanija " Au de Rose of Damascus" 2015

Rayyane Tabet "Steel Rings" 2013

Rheim Alkhadi  "Each Hair is a Tongue" 2013

Adrian Villar Rojas "Planetarium" 2015