Asma Belhamar, Monuments of Alfreej (detail), 2023
(excerpt)
Twenty years after Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor introduced a non-Western curatorial model to documenta 11, we can witness the impact of his thinking upon the Sharjah Biennial. Sharjah Art Foundation director Hoor Al Qasimi—and curator of Sharjah Biennial 15—began to reconsider traditions of cultural representation after she met Enwezor and experienced that exhibition in Kassel, Germany. As she organized Sharjah Biennial 6 (2003), Al Qasimi stepped away from the national pavilion model. In an interview with the author, she recalls, for example, selecting Tarek Al-Ghoussein, an artist of Palestinian and Kuwaiti heritage who lived in the United Arab Emirates: “I thought, how can you put people into borders or international identities when it is more complicated than that? That was the moment when I decided to say no, no more.”
Over time, Enwezor’s emblematic “postcolonial constellation” has given way to new nomenclature. On the 30th anniversary of the Sharjah Biennial, hyphenated identities are embraced and amplified. Polyphonic, polycentric, circular, decentralized, inclusive, and intergenerational, Sharjah Biennial 15 is truly of the moment. Expressions of modern global identity and postnational hybridity are omnipresent and abundantly clear, surfacing in the art and in the ways that artists talk about their projects.
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Hiding in plain sight, Monuments of Alfreej (2023), the lyric site-specific intervention of Dubai-based artist Asma Belhamar, is a design-based project that intends to illuminate the impact of immigrant labor, over time, on culture in Sharjah. (Emiratis represent slightly more than 10 percent of the total populace there.) Belhamar’s biennial project calls our attention to the South Asian laborers who built the Sheikh Khalid Bin Mohammed Palace in the early 20th century. Delving into the architectural memory of the newly restored palace in Al Dhaid, she quietly transforms the decorative balustrade along the surrounding outer walls and the building’s roof railing. The artist re-imagines elements of the original design by insinuating a warped, gestural motif of her own into dilapidated sections. The work manifests a sense of culture in flux at the same time that it reflects upon unsung cultural contributors.