[by Hoor Al-Qasimi, director, Sharjah international Biennial 6 on behalf of the artists, their curators and their work.]
The sixth Sharjah Biennial hosts have a long history. Venice is celebrating its 50th Anniversary in June this year. Sharjah, over 12 years, has followed the protocols established by Venice, categorizing artists in terms of their national identity. Its remit to survey the art being made in both Arab countries and in the Islamic world, was contextualized by inclusion of practices that operate “outside” that world.
By allocating further debate, neither “inside”, nor “outside” the terms of nationality, but along the borders of these distinct categories of country, identities are presented in an index of new art practices. This extended category (art) is often itself too indistinct, or general a term, to enable what is radical, or different to be recognized, but it is used as an organizational principle.
The academic aim of the Biennial is to locate culture; to search out and identify new developments of collaboration. Politics, allied to popular culture and ecology, as a discourse, are often key issues in the concerns and productions of all youthful manifestation, including art. Within the generation’s varied activities, it is idealism that provides the creative energy for it to engage ethically with its societies and in the world.
Artists in particular are notable for declaring their enthusiasm by their work. This is evidence of their humanity. In actively pursing the diversity and delicate strands of these social and human aspects of an unsetting time of change and its inter – culture transformation. The location of this process is diffuse.
The 6th Biennial has aimed at the locations of culture via a survey of the conditions for, and evidence of, new art. It reveals constants: the recurring themes, anxieties, and hopes of people’s wish for community as expressed in the sensitive terms of a new situation and the aesthetic that therein emerges.
We have the pleasure of standing as the host, having invited international curators as the intermediaries of these developments. In this sense we also take great pride in this city and its cultural role. Heritage itself, in the sense of an unanticipated globalization, may have. The past can play a constructive part in the present by excavating a space in the developing urban terrain for experimentation and renewal. The Biennial has selected artists on the basis of locating culture within aesthetic experiment. Art and its institution implicitly requires the tolerance of education and its intellectual freedom, as the raison d’être of its study and research. It is highly appropriate therefore that in not only difficult, but peaceful times we bring forward the educational and ethical procedures that are attached to the field of art and aesthetics.
Art is always a means to see differently and a fulcrum capable of distributing potentials. In order to presage advances that are either unforeseeable from other more disciplines, or else cannot be generated by other alliances (of science and technology, for example, or economics and sociology) we propose these new aesthetic situations that advance interdisciplinary formats, especially witnessed in the work of this present time and generation.
