ArtAsiaPacific — May-June 2017

Reviews artasiapacific.com^137

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JITISH KALLAT
Epilogue
2011
Pigment print on archival paper, 753
prints: 31.7 x 39.4 cm each.
Courtesy Nature Morte, New Delhi.

This page

MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL
Hypothesis of a Tree
2016
Bamboo structure, rubbings on Japanese
paper and sumi ink, dimensions variable.
Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation.

Biennials frequently appear at odds with

themselves, torn between static formats of display

and the ever-evolving discourses they enable.

Within Sharjah Biennial 13’s (SB13) yearlong

program—with projects in five cities organized

according to four thematic keywords—the portion

that took place in Sharjah (“Act I”) represented

conversations in progress. Curator Christine Tohmé

titled the Biennial “Tamawuj,” an Arabic word that

describes the undulations of waves, and suggests

the frothy cycles of societal improvement and

degeneration in the region. SB13’s four keywords

correspond to projects organized by Tohmé’s

interlocutors: artist Kader Attia’s symposium on

“water” held in Dakar in January; curator Zeynep

Öz’s mid-May exhibition in Istanbul of existing and

commissioned artworks associated with “crops”;

artist-books commissioned by Lara Khaldi on the

theme of “earth,” to debut in Ramallah in August;

and a program of talks, performances and

exhibitions—similar to Tohmé’s own Home Works

initiative—organized with the curator’s colleagues

at Beirut’s Ashkal Alwan in October on “the

culinary.” As expressions of conditions “both

elemental and cultural,” these keywords were the

nodes around which artworks and performances

by more than 70 artists, including 32 new projects,

loosely congregated in Sharjah.

The Sharjah Art Foundation’s spaces in al-

Mureijah Square had a strong ecological theme,

such as Allora & Calzadilla’s 2014 three-channel

video The Great Silence, about the language

spoken by parrots that live underneath a radio

telescope in Puerto Rico used by humans to

transmit messages into space. Mariana Castillo

Deball’s Hypothesis of a Tree (2016), a radiating

bamboo structure from which were hanging

frottages of fossil sediments, and Hind Mezaina’s

cyanotype prints of plants found in neglected

locations around Dubai, brought into focus how

artists are memorializing the disappearing natural

world. Certain works came off as dilettantish in

the face of environmental destruction, such as

Futurefarmers’ re-creation of a ship mast that

doubles as a radio antenna receiving barely visible

transmissions from the collective’s private boat

trip, Seed Journey (2017). However, others were

more persuasive in uniting ecological and political

concerns. İz Öztat and Fatma Belkis’s installation

(made entirely without electricity) of palm-frond

structures displaying hand-printed tapestries

and a radio play, Who Carries the Water (2015/17),

for instance, drew inspiration from the local

environmental movements in the central Anatolian

region of Dersim, where the residents haves spent

decades resisting the Turkish state’s attempts to

convert waterways into hydroelectric facilities.

While Tohmé is capable of facilitating dialogue,

the specific kind of experiential thought-lines

generated between artworks—and not necessarily

between their creators—within a given setting was

comparatively underdeveloped within the context

of SB13’s larger discursive program. In one example,

the cramped pairing of Monika Sosnowska’s

massive hanging sculpture Façade (2013), which is

based on the exterior frames of a modernist building

in Warsaw, with Mariana Castillo Deball’s (also

hanging) sculpture about evolutionary biological

structures was unflattering to both. Their thematic

relationship to one another and Zhou Tao’s film Blue

and Red (2014), which was playing in the same space

and showed scenes from Thailand amid political

upheaval, seemed tangential, even nonexistent.

The Biennial’s most evocative section was a

series of videos and installations clustered around

Calligraphy Square about the body and violence.

Jonathas de Andrade’s film O Peixe (2016) captures

fishermen in northeastern Brazil hugging their

catches, each stroking the fish’s skin until its

life is extinguished. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s

installation Saydnaya (The Missing 19db) (2017)

dramatically narrates how researchers (including

Abu Hamdan) have utilized accounts of the near-

silent conditions enforced in Syria’s most notorious

prison to produce sonic maps of the interior

architecture, and to estimate the number of people

(more than 13,000) likely killed there. İnci Eviner’s

animation Beuys Underground (2017) was a video

tableau depicting an underground city populated

by small figures engaged in absurdist motions,

captioned with phrases such as “study of solidarity”

or “dissemination of ideas,” while predatory

humanoids patrol the earth’s polluted surface. It

was a depressingly accurate portrayal of societal

conditions not only in Turkey but everywhere in

which advocates of open, healthy societies have

been forced, like certain seeds, to hibernate until

they can germinate again.

HG MASTERS

SHARJAH

Various locations

SHARJAH BIENNIAL 13

TAMAWUJ: ACT I