Latest news with #SharjahBiennial
Gulf Today
01-07-2025
- General
- Gulf Today
Angela Harutyunyan, Paula Nascimentoare Sharjah Biennial 17 curators: SAF
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento have been appointed as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17, opening January 2027. Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda, Angola. 'Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact," said Hoor Al Qasimi, SAF President and Director. "Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories. Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.' Working in close collaboration, the mandate for the curators is to shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah emirate. 'The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,' said Harutyunyan. 'I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.' American University in Cairo campus. For Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with structures and models of exhibition-making, as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. 'I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between art making and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art's capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,' she said. Based in Berlin, Angela Harutyunyan (b. 1982, Gyumri, Armenia) is a founding member of The Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Yeravan, and the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research. She has curated several exhibitions, including This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time (with Nat Muller) at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2014) and the American University of Beirut Art Galleries (2015). She obtained her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Manchester in 2009 and previously taught at the American University in Cairo (2009-2010) and also at the American University of Beirut (2011–2023). One of the founding editors of ARTMargins, she has extensively researched and written on post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory. She is the author of The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the 'painterly real' 1987–1994 (Manchester University Press, 2017). She has published internationally on the autonomy of art, art and the public sphere, cultural politics and curatorial practices in the post-Socialist condition and in the Middle East. Paula Nascimento's (b. 1981, Luanda, Angola) practice is rooted at the intersection of visual arts, urbanism, geopolitics and arts education. She engages with interdisciplinary methodologies with a focus on contemporary readings of historical themes in and around Africa and the Global South. An associate curator of the sixth and seventh editions of the Lubumbashi Biennial (2019, 2022), she has also developed projects and curated exhibitions internationally, including Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography, Experimenta Design, Triennale di Milano and the Angola Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion for best national participation in 2013. She is a curatorial advisor to Hangar Centre of Artistic Research, Lisbon, and a member of the acquisitions committee of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian. In 2023, Nascimento was a member of the visual arts jury for the annual DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, a platform for artistic and cultural exchange in and beyond Europe. Angela Harutyunyan (left) and Paula Nascimento. SAF is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. It provides an experimental and wide-ranging programme model, supporting the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the culture of the region and encourages an understanding of the transformational role of art. The Foundation's core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications. Established in 2009 to expand programmes beyond the Sharjah Biennial, which launched in 1993, SAF is a significant resource for artists and cultural organisations in the Gulf and a monitor of local, regional and international developments in contemporary art. The Foundation is committed to developing and sustaining the cultural life and heritage of Sharjah; it is reflected through year-round exhibitions, performances, screenings and educational programmes, mainly hosted in historic buildings that have been repurposed as cultural and community centres. A growing collection reflects the Foundation's support of contemporary artists in the realisation of new work and its recognition of the contributions made by pioneering modern artists from the region and around the world. SAF is a legally independent public body established by Emiri Decree and supported by government funding, grants from national and international non-profits, cultural organisations, corporate sponsors and individual patrons. All its exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Sharjah 24
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sharjah 24
Sharjah Art Foundation launches Studio and Residency Programmes
The Studio Programme makes a wide range of spaces available to creatives at different stages of their careers, offering studio leases for up to three years. Additionally, free work spaces are offered to recent fine arts graduates and PhD candidates to assist them in periods of transition. The Residency Programme, open to visual artists, performance artists, writers, poets, researchers, musicians, filmmakers and other creatives who wish to pursue their experimental, interdisciplinary practice, offers flights and transportation to Sharjah, accommodation and a monthly stipend. Residents will also have access to the Foundation's institutional networks and resources. The application process for the Residency Programme will begin soon, while the open call for the Studio Programme will go out later in the year. Our Venues: Collections Building, Sharjah City The Collections Building, used in the past for exhibitions and artwork storage, currently hosts workshops and artist studios. Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, Sharjah City Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, a creek-side heritage house in the Al Shuwaiheen neighbourhood, was the personal residence of pearl merchant Obaid Bin Hamad Al Shamsi and his family until the 1970s. Dating to the mid-nineteenth century, the complex comprises 16 rooms built around an airy central courtyard. In the late 1990s, the house was restored and repurposed as a suite of artist studios and exhibition spaces. The complex offers panoramic views of the creek from its rooftop terrace. Serving as a Sharjah Biennial venue for large-scale installations and performances since 2009, Bait Obaid Al Shamsi also hosts regular art workshops, residencies and year-round events. Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah City Once the personal residence of Issa Bin Abdul Latif Al Serkal, the British Commissioner for the Arabian Gulf, and later home to the late Sheikh Mohammed Bin Saqr Al Qasimi, Bait Al Serkal dates to the nineteenth century. Converted into Sharjah's first maternity hospital in the early 1960s, the heritage house was restored and transformed into an arts and cultural centre in the mid-1990s. Small rooms lining arched corridors as well as an open courtyard, large hall and portico on the upper level are used for Sharjah Biennials and a range of other Foundation programming. Al Hamriyah Studios, Al Hamriyah Built on the site of a former souq near the Arabian Gulf coastline, Al Hamriyah Studios offers multifunctional spaces for the production and exhibition of artworks. Combining avant-garde and modern architectural technologies, the complex preserves much of the original footprint of the market, including the central courtyard. Landscaped with local greenery and sculpture, the outdoor area now serves as a place for quiet contemplation or conversation. The venue has hosted exhibitions, site-specific installations, performances and outdoor film screenings. Designed by architect Khaled Al Najjar, Al Hamriyah Studios was inaugurated by the Foundation in 2017. Kalba Ice Factory, Kalba Retrofitted by Lima-based 51-1 Arquitectos to preserve the feel of open industrial spaces, Kalba Ice Factory boasts well-lighted exhibition areas, art studios and residential accommodation within a natural setting. The complex is located next to Kalba Creek and Al Qurm mangroves, home to many endangered species of birds, turtles and lizards. The 1970s brutalist concrete structure, enclosed by the saw-tooth silhouette of a corrugated metal roof, was once a fish feed mill and ice storage facility. Acquired by Sharjah Art Foundation in 2012, it has been used as Sharjah Biennial venue since 2015.
Sharjah 24
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sharjah 24
SAF announces curators of Sharjah Biennial 17
Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda. 'Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact. Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories,' says Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. 'Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.' Working in close collaboration, the curators will shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah. 'The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,' says Harutyunyan. 'I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.' For Paula Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with forms and models of exhibition-making, and as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. 'I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between artmaking and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art's capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,' she says.
Mada
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mada
The indigenous, the current and the art of the Sharjah Biennial
The Sharjah creek runs parallel to the old Sharjah market. While searching for freshly grinded turmeric for a friend, we came across Photo Kegham, quietly nestled between the shops. Photo Kegham, part of the 16th Sharjah Biennial, is a reproduction of Gaza's first photo studio, originally located on Gaza City's central Omar al-Mukhtar street. The installation draws from an archive preserved by artist Kegham Djeghalian, grandson of Kegham Djeghalian Sr., who founded the studio. Born in Anatolia, Djeghalian Sr. fled with his family to Syria during the Armenian Genocide, later moving to Jerusalem, where he trained in photography, before eventually settling in Gaza and establishing Photo Kegham in 1944. Djeghalian curated the content of three boxes of his grandfather's negatives, revealing an intimate portrayal of everyday life in Gaza. Before its current iteration at the Sharjah Biennial, the project was presented in various forms: at Rawabet Art Space in Cairo (2021), the Institut français d'Égypte (2024), the Photographers' Gallery in London (2024), and Fonderie Kugler in Geneva (2025) — each offering a distinct curatorial approach, beginning with Cairo. At the biennial, a selection of the photographs are separately exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum's main venue, restaging glimpses of lives once lived in Gaza. Each photograph carries with it a lineage of histories and experiences to be imagined through the captivity of the image. But then there is the shop outside, its stark presence signaling disappearance more than return. The literal apparition of Gaza in Sharjah is disorienting. The architectural reconstruction of Photo Kegham's facade is striking — subtly embedded within the fabric of Sharjah's old market, yet unmistakably staged. In contrast to the generative, layered substance of the photographs in the museum, the careful replication of the studio verges on fetishism. The tension between art as spectacle and its political potential is a defining and perhaps inevitable feature of the Sharjah Biennial. Biennials amplify the question through the density of artistic production, but also, perhaps, augment the promise: will this profusion of art sharpen our attention? Will it unsettle us? Will it reorient our perception? Or does the very inclusion in the biennial risk neutralizing art, muting its performative potential? Does the biennial open up a platform for possibility, or does it risk becoming a structure of containment? What, if anything, allows art to exceed the terms of its exhibition? The curators of the 16th Sharjah Biennial — Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz — pose a perennial question: 'What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on?' The answer, for many participating artists, lies somewhere in indigenous roots. Over 40 of the biennial's 190 participating artists center indigeneity in their work, celebrating marginalized cultures of origin while mourning erasure and dispossession. Some works present a spectacle of indigeneity, a quest for visibility, a form of signage within the binds of a contemporary art biennial. Others stage indigeneity to pose questions or offer propositions. While the former tend to perform a predictable role of political responsibility within the exhibition, the latter manage to transcend its confines. One of the works that depart from indigeneity to ask political questions is Hylozoic/Desires, the mutli-media performance duo of Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. Their film, The Hedge of Halomancy (2024), features Mayalee, a woman performing rituals using the same salt extracted by the British from the native Great Indian Hedge in the late 1800s. The Hedge of Halomancy contrasts rare archival findings documenting the salt extractions, in which its protagonist appears only marginally as a 'dancing girl' or a courtesean, with the fictional account in which she performs a salt ritual. The duo also present a series of staged photographs from the film's imagined world. One of them, titled عراف الهالة (The Halomancer), portrays a diviner who seeks insight by casting salt into the air. For the duo, what appears in the archive as a courtesan resisting the loss of her right to salt becomes a woman enacting a ritual. We don't know what made this piece stand out in its wrestling with the native's right — is it the rigor of the research and its layered, speculative morphing? the quality of the form that both reveals and withholds? Perhaps not knowing is better. The biennial is dizzying, with countless works that reenact indigeneity in a quest to make the native visible or to declare the plight of the indigenous. This presence demarcated the politics of this edition, yet it did not pass without the tension of being curiously housed in Sharjah, where indigeneity is neither clearly defined nor synonymous with marginalization. But the oddities of Sharjah's homemaking for the art world is nothing new. Sri Lankan artist Rajni Perera paints Lover not a Fighter (2024), which takes inspiration from traditional oral rituals suppressed by the colonization of his home country. American artist Sky Hopinka from the Ho-Chunk Nation of the Midwest mounts a three-channel road trip video titled In Dreams and Autumn (2021), where they use Chinuk Wawa, an indigenous language, as a 'means of return.' Australian artist Yhonnie Scarce, descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia, presents Operation Buffalo, an installation that opens the Hamriyah coastal site with shimmering glass pieces suspended from the sky like atmosphere — the work is a spectral prelude to this liminal industrial shoreline north of Sharjah, one of the Biennial's key off-site venues. Their technique of making gestures to the mushroom clouds left by nuclear tests in the Maralinga desert of South Australia in the 1950s — tests that contaminated land inhabited by indigenous communities for years after. Hopinka's images are scenic, Perera's paintings adroit, and Scarce's installation spectacular. Yet their aesthetic craft somewhat lock their political potential, they are often consumed in their exhibitionism. In a way, interventions like Fabio Morais's murals unintentionally respond to the dilemma of aesthetics dispersing political potential. The Brazilian artist turns aesthetics into gesture, placing discourse at the forefront. One of his murals reads: 'We fulfilled pacts and agreements, but suddenly…' — a sentence that repeats and then fragments into scattered letters. Morais's nod is to the shaky foundation of the textual tradition of the law, but the erosion he evokes could just as easily belong to contemporary art. One of this year's biennial exhibition sites is the decommissioned Al-Qasimiya School, renovated in 2019 by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Vacant of schooling, yet full of its traces — educational signage and classrooms encircling a playground. It was one of the most magical spaces we encountered. We wonder if it's a kind of nostalgia for a school that has not yet been, a space of childhood emptied of indoctrination, where art takes on the role of pedagogy, while admitting to its vulnerability, its shakiness. The school holds one of the works most resonant with us, and with anyone grappling with being an incapacitated witness to Israel's genocide in Gaza, a genocide unfolding in intimate spatial and psychic proximity, the stuff of hauntology. Gazan artists Mohamed al-Hawajri and Dina Mattar were invited to exhibit works they managed to rescue during their escape from Israeli airstrikes on the Bureij camp in Deir al-Balah. Hawajri shows several of his inked bone-based sculptures alongside a vivid, staggering painting of their flight from war — a scene also depicted in Mattar's works and in a video by the two artists' eldest son, Ahmed. Their younger children, Mahmoud and Lea, contribute too: Mahmoud with crafted puppets whose wide eyes stare back at us, and Lea with drawings of houses, birds and suns, often delicately adorned with pasted bougainvillea petals. The exhibition does not change our position as incapacitated witnesses to the genocide. If anything, it throws into sharper relief the dissonance of our daily lives as politically engaged, middle-class cultural workers — lives that, in moments like this, feel unavoidably complicit, even hedonistic. But this exhibition specifically offers a slight reprieve from the burden of consuming the spectacle of art in the context of genocide. It felt like a kind of homecoming. One can barely escape seeing the pieces as both artworks and survivors — self-contained objects in a spectacle, and at once witnesses to and traces of their conditions of making. These are works that carry more than the intention of art; their fleeing journey is now part of them. They bear the messiness of staying alive amid genocide — the horror not yet rendered legible, the fugitivity they aspire to. When writing critique, we are often invited to learn how to read works immanently, but in this art space, mounted in a bygone school, we find ourselves unlearning the rules. Each work gestures toward something beyond itself. They are bearers of their own negativity. Palestinian singer and sound artist Bint Mbareh presented a new sound work titled What's Left? (2025) at Qasimiya as well. She assembled a choir as a communal act, summoning the air it takes to vibrate herself away from the heaviness of genocide through singing. The piece draws on her research into communal singing practices around rainfall in Palestine — traditions that resist colonial narratives of water scarcity. Like other ancestry-bound artists in the biennial, Bint Mbareh works with revolutionary songs passed down across generations. Among them is the iconic سـاعة التحرير دقّت (The hour of liberation has arrived), featured in Jewish-born Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Sorour's film about the Dhofar rebellion against British colonizers in Oman. Layered and embodied, yet deeply contemporary, the work manages to flip the game of nostalgia. And just as we might ask the exhausted question, does nostalgia impede urgency?, What's Left? seems to offer another: Can sharpening our gaze on what we are nostalgic for liberate it from impotence? But the perils of nostalgia are often evoked in sound — and the double LP on vinyl Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2025), also presented in Qasimiya, got to us. We were drawn in by a magnetic remix of a chant that always managed to tremble through us: علي وعلي وعلي الصوت اللي بيهتف ما بيموت (Raise, raise, raise your voice; those who chant do not die). The remix, by Ruanne Abu Rahme and Bassel Abbas, stems from their ongoing performance May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth (2020 – ongoing), and features music commissioned from DJ Haram, Julmud, Makimakkuk, Muqataa, Freddie June, among others. The LP is part of a broader show, Speaking with the Dead, curated by Palestinian writer and curator Adam HajYahia, and undertaken by Bilnaes, or In the Negative, an 'adisciplinary' platform that also intervenes in how artistic collaborations are distributed. HajYahia engages the question of debt as a discursive device indexing colonial history and an ongoing capitalist condition. With it, he brings together Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça's raw scribbles, Asian-American artist Martin Wong's bestial painting of White Cypress, Palestinian artists Dina Mimi's montage of images of resistance for liberation and Muhannad al-Azzeh's embodied facial sketches of Palestinian imprisonment. There is nothing poetic or complete in this show — it is precisely 'in the negative,' and this is where its authority lies: in its wrestling with art forms that exceed the totality of discourse, and with discourse that floods art with its certainty. Many artists in Sharjah worked with textiles, and each time we encountered these works, it felt like a hug. Isn't clothing a form of hugging? In Qasimiya, the school's central grounds are embraced by recycled cotton bedsheets, pillowcases, burial cloth and other fabrics — including silk and chiffon — by Emirati artist Hashel al-Lamki. One hanging cloth even had some questions for us: Were you the reason behind someone's tears? Were you the cause of an animal's distress? Did you torture a plant and forget to give it water? The work's statement claims to summon wisdom. Its presence amid classrooms housing different artworks evokes the kind of knowledge weaving that once threaded through schools. In Dhaid, a more distant oasis in Sharjah, the biennial extended into a palace, an old clinic, and a farm — spaces where the artworks seemed to take up more room. We walked into a formidable pool-like architectural installation and recognized Mahmoud Khaled, a compatriot and member of our community in Egypt. In Pool of Perspective – 2030 (2025), he stages a voided future as a site of malfunction, referencing the mega-national construction projects back home, laden with the promise of futurity. This illusory future is embedded in the structure through various forms of optical play. We also found Wael Shawky's I am Hymns of the New Temples (2023) and enjoyed a fragment of his theatrical production crafted through tableaus that fantasize the real. The work belongs to a similar repertoire of films Shawky makes, using similar form to stage a different protagonist: In this case, it's the story of the ruins of Pompeii. On our way out, we stopped at the farm in Dhaid, where musicians and sound artists composed with trees, waterways and other lifeforms in the deserted oasis. Among them were Joe Namy — whose main work Dub Plant, tracing connections between radio and agriculture, we sadly missed — Başak Günak, Sandy Chamoun, Hauptmeier|Recker, Berke Can Özcan and Sary Moussa. It was magical. Many of the works predictably engaged with ecological questions, especially around resources. Italian Libyan artist Adelita Husney-Bey uses art and pedagogy to think with water about scarcity, famine and colonialism. Brazilian artist Luana Vitra imagines attraction and desire between minerals as a refusal of extraction for profit. Filipina-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang takes us to the curious worlds of pearl diving and industrialization in the Arabian Gulf, the Philippines and China. From the Gulf, most of the art deals with similar questions. Saudi artist Ayman Zedani spotlights an ancient fungi, recovered in Saudi Arabia, in an experimental film about its violent extraction — an echo of the oil industry. Kuwaiti artist Monira al-Qadiri presents an oil refinery that shimmers as both metropolis and sci-fi city. Bahraini artist Mariam Alnoaimi collaborates with fishermen and biologists to explore the Gulf's waters not as sites of trade and transfer, but as lived environments. An unconventional work in this Gulf tapestry is Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah, who turns more directly to the everyday. Her You Ask, We Answer (2024) — a massive canvas sprawling across several rooms — brims with images, paintings, and collage. It's playful, ceaseless, whimsical and doesn't care to exceed its own aesthetic momentum. On the short drive back to Ajman — just 15 minutes, though it often feels like crossing into another world — we tried to recall what stayed with us. The smallest of the seven emirates, Ajman hasn't caught up with the global integration spree that animates the UAE's vision. It's a rougher edged, laid-back space, where labor is visible and contemporary art is absent. In a reading group on Aesthetic Theory, we learned that art must turn against itself. That line returned to us as we revised the show into memory. We imagined fugitive artworks following us into Ajman. This is probably the art that turns against itself.
The Age
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Major gallery misses out as Sydney's biggest arts festival heads west
'I respect the work of [MCA director] Suzanne Cotter and [chair] Lorraine Tarabay,' she said. 'For me, the work I'm really trying to do is a lot of community engagement and I want to be in places where I can reach new audiences.' The Biennale's theme was inspired by Al Qasimi's father's work as a historian. He is Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi the ruler of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and founder of the Sharjah Biennial, through which Al Qasimi established her international reputation as a curator. 'Rather than focusing on linear storytelling, I hope to highlight how we can become active participants in retelling our collective stories by revisiting and reinterpreting past events,' Al Qasimi said. 'I really wanted to have a title that could connect differently with people. The idea could be the rememory of a certain location or place, the rememory of certain moments in an individual's life, or certain moments that have happened like computer culture. The title is wide enough to encompass a lot of stories without limiting it to one voice.' The biennale is being planned at a febrile time in the arts world, amid turmoil in the Middle East and in the aftermath of a controversial decision to cancel artist Khaled Sabsabi from the Venice Biennale. Sabsabi is a Biennale of Sydney board member. Al Qasimi said the work by Biennale artists would not directly touch on the war in Gaza, unless tangentially in artists' explorations of colonisation and occupation. The biennial would not focus on 'one moment' but 'what is the right project for the right space and for the right place, for example White Bay'. 'I'm really trying to make sure that the building is part of the exhibition rather than just an exhibition space,' she said. Packing Room Prize winner Abdul Abdullah, Yaritji Young, Marian Abboud, Dennis Golding, and Warraba Weatherall will be among the Australian artists to exhibit alongside international artists including the Gaza-born, Paris-based Palestinian multidisciplinary artist, Taysir Batniji. 'I'm really excited about Deirdre O'Mahony, an Irish artist who has worked a lot around agriculture and food sustainability,' Al Qasimi said. 'I've invited Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk, they were the same artists who painted the eight murals on the railway pylons [at Woolloomooloo reserve] to come together to paint a new piece.' Create NSW has committed $1.6 million to support the 25th Biennale. Some 771,000 people attended the 2024 edition, Ten Thousand Suns, in a record-breaking run over three months and six sites, including White Bay. Last month the Biennale announced the new funding raising initiative, ArtSeen, directed at young art lovers. Donations of $500 will enable supporters to gain exclusive access to a year-round program of artist-led events, performances, and discussions in the year before the festival. Cotter, said the MCA was 'a longstanding partner and supporter of the Biennale of Sydney, and we are delighted to be program partner for the 25th edition in 2026'. 'Hoor Al Qasimi is a globally renowned curator, and we are excited to see her Biennale for Sydney as artistic director.'
