PREVAILING LATITUDE

Siddhartha Mitter on the Sharjah Biennial
Siddhartha Mitter, Artforum, May 3, 2023

AT THE DAWN OF THE CENTURY, no special sign presaged Sharjah’s rise to its present status as an artistic incubator and arguably today’s most influential hub of research and creation focused on what is now called the Global South. Yes, its ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, launched the Sharjah Biennial in 1993. But in its early editions, the exhibition was relatively staid, presenting neo-modernist art from Arab and Muslim countries on the national-pavilion model. Compared with glitzy Dubai, the city of Sharjah, capital of the eponymous emirate, was (and remains) low-rise and conservative despite the influx of wealth from oil and gas.

 
One of the hardest contradictions to bridge, in my view, is between, on the one hand, the humanistic approach advocated by the biennial (and the foundation’s projects in general) and, on the other, the UAE’s nationality laws, which put citizenship nearly out of reach for the people of non-Emirati origin who compose the vast bulk of the population, making their status contingent on their labor. Perhaps this context lends an extra edge to the showing of works such as Prajakta Potnis’s multimedia Cracks in the Master’s House, 2021–22, which includes recordings of domestic workers in India expressing the toll of their labor and describing their dreams.
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