Sharjah Biennial Announces Five Curators for 2025

Spotlight Sharjah Biennial 15 Subverts and Contradicts, Generating Potent Reflections Stephanie Bailey

Sharjah Art Foundation has announced the team of five female curators who will steer Sharjah Biennial 16 in the United Arab Emirates.

The curators are: Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell.

‘The Sharjah Biennial embraces an expansive and decentralised approach, an ethos that is echoed by the five unique perspectives we are bringing together for the 16th edition,’ explained Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Ginwala—Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau in Berlin—co-directed the multiverse-mapping 13th Gwangju Biennale in 2021. She is also Artistic Director at Sri-Lankan art festival Colomboscope.

Khalaf, in her role as Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London, has organised various social justice-driven projects, including Radio Ballads (2019–2022), which saw artists including Sonia Boyce and Helen Cammock embedded with social services.

Independent curator Zeynep Öz is making a return to the Sharjah Biennial platform after organising BAHAR (2017), an off-site project for Sharjah Biennial 13 that took place across Istanbul.

Curator and researcher Alia Swastika is director of Yogyakarta’s Biennale Jogja Foundation, which focuses on artists from close to the equator. She also co-directed the ninth Gwangju Biennale, ROUNDTABLE (2012), with Mami Kataoka and Sunjung Kim.

Megan Tamati-Quennell, meanwhile, brings a First Nations perspective as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Maori and Indigenous at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa.

Each curator will invite artists and develop programmes in dialogue with one another to create the 16th Biennial programming.

‘Sharjah Biennial 16 will offer the opportunity to witness their ideas in conversation, culminating in a truly polyphonic examination of contemporary art and cultural practice,’ Al Qasimi said.

The last edition of the Biennial, Thinking Historically in the Present, ran from February to June this year. Curated by Al Qasimi herself, it worked from a vision bequeathed by the late curator Okwui Enwezor. —[O]

Main image: Images (left to right): Natasha Ginwala (Photo: Victoria Tomaschko), Amal Khalaf (Photo: Christa Holka), Zeynep Öz (Photo: Öykü Çakar-Smith), Alia Swastika (Photo: Yudha Kusum), and Megan Tamati-Quennell (Photo: Ola Thorsen, US Embassy New Zealand). Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation.