Rossella Biscotti
The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.
The Biennial theme, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?
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Rossella Biscotti
Saturated Salty Mud Stories (2025)
Drawing on memories of land and sea, Rossella Biscotti’s latest projects explore the complexities of nature as both a resource and a site of contestation within history. The artist uses desert sand, water, salt, soil, plant ashes and metal piping to carefully open up deeper references to trade, colonialism, extractivism, exploitation, migration and mobility. Saturated Salty Mud Stories (2025) combines three different bodies of work into a unique spatial installation. Circulations (2024-2025) nods to the UAE’s energy economy by crafting fragments of oil and gas pipelines into large tentacular sculptures, while Oil Vessels Time smuggling geometry (2025) features two glass sculptures moulded after ancient Islamic oil and perfume vessels. The series Sand Portables (2025) refers to alchemical processes and exchanges. For this work, Biscotti conducts experiments with ceramic and glazes developed with French-Palestinian ceramist Maia Beyrouti, using specific materials partially foraged by the artist in Sharjah.
- Alia Swastika