On February 6, 2025, in one of the wealthiest regions of the Middle East, amid the desert heat, an art event was getting under way: the 16th Sharjah Biennial, “To Carry.” More than 190 artists were presenting over 600 works, including more than 200 new commissions. The biennial also invited numerous artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, bringing a more diverse range of cultures into the desert for exchange and dialogue.
As the cultural heart of the Middle East, Sharjah has now hosted the biennial for 32 years, making it a distillation of the region’s contemporary-art ecology. All five curators of this edition are women. In the Middle East, a society typically dominated by men, women nonetheless occupy a leading position in contemporary art—a fact that can be startling to visitors encountering contemporary art from the region for the first time. At the 16th Sharjah Biennial, 2025: Why are women so prominent in Middle Eastern contemporary art?
What produced this distinctive artistic ecology? Why has the region undergone, over the past 20 years, a development that has even drawn the attention of Western capital? On site, we spoke with the mainland Chinese artists Shao Chun and Liu Chuang; Amal Khalaf, one of the biennial’s curators and director of public programs at Serpentine; and Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, a central figure in the development of contemporary art in the Middle East and the 2024 leader of Art Power’s ranking. We discussed the Sharjah Biennial and the state of contemporary art in the Middle East as they see it.
Traditional architecture in Sharjah. Those unfamiliar with Sharjah may not know that it is the third-largest emirate in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, after Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It is also an Arab cultural center recognized by UNESCO and one of the most active regions for contemporary art in the Middle East. Although it is only a 20-minute drive from Dubai, Sharjah is markedly different from Dubai’s glittering excess. We see few skyscrapers; instead, there are more mosque-like forms and off-white stone buildings.
As a Gulf city, Sharjah is also one of the rare places in the desert where vivid blue sea and blowing sand can be seen at once, producing an especially intriguing ecological and cultural phenomenon. Wooden boats rest on the water in Sharjah. Sunset over Sharjah’s gulf. “Sharjah has preserved more of the atmosphere of traditional culture—the architectural style, the character of the city, its historical and cultural particularities, and so on. For example, I love the traditional wooden boats at the harbor. As someone from the Gulf, these boats are part of my childhood memories, but they have disappeared from many places.”
“Sharjah has kept them. I feel warmed every time I see them,” the Kuwait-born curator Amal told us. Although many people may assume that the Sharjah Biennial is strongly rooted in place, it is in fact international, highly diverse, and inclusive. Like the title of this edition, “To Carry,” it is less a specific theme than a proposition. People arrive with their own experiences, generating possibilities that resemble multiple universes.
“To carry” encompasses an infinite range of ideas—family, history, culture, pain, endurance, change, innovation, and the struggles and songs within us. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. In addition to the main venues in Sharjah’s old city, works are distributed through a deserted old town buried in the sand, a library, a converted hospital outside the city, an old park, a former traditional fruit-and-vegetable market, a repurposed ice factory, and a former sheikh’s council chamber.
“Over the past few months, we installed a series of sculptures and installations in these public spaces. Many older people, children, and workers passing by would stop and ask, ‘What is this?’ or ‘What happened?’ It is a beautiful form of interaction, showing people’s interest in art and their increasingly open attitude,” the curator Amal said. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Madam Buried Village, 2025. Compared with the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, or Asia’s Gwangju Biennale and Shanghai Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial is distinctive as the oldest biennial in the Middle East—and as a religious and cultural melting pot. Alongside local Arabs, the region is home to large populations from South and Southeast Asia.
It is therefore easy to see that many works in the biennial use languages beyond Arabic, including Urdu, Hindi, Filipino, and even the Mandarin familiar to us. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, 2025. Search for Life II, a video work jointly created by a group of artists from China, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates, draws on several cultural contexts. Part of it was filmed in China, with additional footage shot on islands in the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines, and it is projected onto a 35-square-meter curtain of glass beads.
The 550 postcards by the Singaporean artist Zhang Yiman use photographs to allow visitors from different cultural backgrounds to stand before a bookshelf, select the cards that resonate most strongly with them, and piece together stories of their own. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, 2025. This aligns with what the curatorial team hoped the works would communicate: that, in different cultural contexts, they could still produce some form of recognition in viewers.
“Sharjah’s geographic and cultural advantages make it a place suited to dialogue. And these dialogues are not centered on the West; they look more toward the countries around the Indian Ocean, Asia, Africa, and Mexico. They can bypass Europe’s heavy historical burdens and engage in newer, more active discussions about art.” Shown here is a work by the renowned Taiwanese artist Wu Yuling. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Old Al Diwan Al Amiri, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Old Al Diwan Al Amiri, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Hamriyah Studio, 2025. An internationally known curator, she is a director at Serpentine and has lived in London for 20 years, giving her an intimate understanding of the mainstream Western art system.
“I don’t think London is the center of the art world, and neither is New York. The art dialogues taking place in places like Sharjah and across Asia are more interesting, and better able to redefine the idea of a global art center,” Amal said. We also saw differences among Arab art, the Asian art familiar to us, and art produced within the traditional Western framework. Middle Eastern artists often use textiles and embroidery to address women, labor, social division of labor, and gender. Weaving as a medium has also become a major current in contemporary art in recent years.
16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, 2025. Many artists also collaborate with local traditional-fabric weaving workshops and old-style candle workshops, attempting through art to express primal beliefs and the mysterious rituals of religion.
Environmental concerns, grand historical narratives, and accounts of war recur throughout the biennial. Performance occupies an important place in contemporary art in the Middle East and is deeply connected to Arab traditional music, instruments, dance, and religious worship. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Hamriyah Studio, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba Ice Factory, 2025. Septina Layan performing live, 16th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba Ice Factory, 2025. During the first week of the biennial, most of the performances we saw combined chanting, dance, traditional music, and theater.
This is also related to the curators’ collaborative work with local music workshops. They work with Palestinian musicians, designers, and artists to curate together. Top left: Natasha Ginwala; center left: Zeynep Öz; bottom left: Megan Tamati-Quennell; top right: Alia Swastika; bottom right: Amal Khalaf. It is impossible to discuss this edition without mentioning its striking all-women curatorial team: Natasha Ginwala of Sri Lanka; the Indonesian curator Alia Swastika; the Bahrain-Singaporean artist Amal Khalaf; the New Zealand artist Megan Tamati-Quennell; and the Turkish curator Zeynep Öz.
The curator Amal told us that Sharjah is, in fact, a place where women occupy a relatively high social position and are highly respected.
“Of course, in the Middle East there are situations in which women are confined to domestic roles; it depends on your particular social background. I was lucky that my family encouraged women to study, work, and become leaders. From childhood, I was never shaped by the idea that ‘women should stay at home.’” 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba Ice Factory, 2025. Among the participating works, installations and sculptures predominate, and they are generally enormous in scale—evidence of the artists’ considerable ambition.
The next most common medium is video, with many works commissioned specifically for the Sharjah Biennial by the five curators. Amal told us that she is especially fond of commissioned works. “For me, the entire process of commissioning is filled with trust and risk. I cannot predict what the final work will be, but that is the exciting part.” In selecting artists and works, the curatorial team focused on their practices during the period from 2023 to 2025.
The world has experienced extensive wars, violent events, black-swan events, and a pandemic in recent years. How, in response, should art address reality? 16th Sharjah Biennial, Buhais Geology Park, 2025. Over the past 20 years, the art centers of the Middle East have undergone dramatic change. In the past, cities such as Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus were cultural centers, but war and economic strain in recent years have forced many artists and cultural workers to relocate.
Today, rapid economic development, the movement of international capital, and the convenience of travel have helped make Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah new art centers in the Middle East. Museums, art centers, and galleries continue to be established, drawing practitioners from around the world, including China. At the entrance to Al Murcijah Art Square, 16th Sharjah Biennial, 2025. At the biennial, we repeatedly ran into the two mainland Chinese participating artists, Liu Chuang and Shao Chun, in different venues.
For both artists, it was their first invitation to the Sharjah Biennial and their first visit to the city. Its varied artistic forms and mixture of cultures gave them further creative inspiration. The artist Shao Chun. Shao Chun, born in Hangzhou in 1987, received her doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2019. After a residency in Austria, she returned to Hangzhou, where she now works and lives. Her work in the biennial, Future Touch, is a series of soft sculptures and videos made in 2020, combining traditional craft with electronic programming, video, and interaction in a highly poetic and finely wrought manner.
Shao Chun, Future Touch, 2020, 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. Shao Chun, Future Touch, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist. Her sculptures resemble alien organisms from some future world: round forms with pink skin, hair, and long feelers. They embody an exceptionally high level of craft and technical exploration.
The videos and photographs document her handling of the sculptures while wearing transparent gloves, presenting their static and dynamic aspects as two sides of the same work.
“I show the moving sculptures while wearing gloves because everyone’s hands are different. I wanted to remove individuality and concentrate all attention on the sculptures,” she said. Shao Chun, earlier work The Lure, 2022, installation view of the exhibition “Mi-Ti.” Shao Chun, earlier work Future Feng Shui, 2020. “The Sharjah Biennial is spread out across the city, and the works have a strong relationship to their spaces. My earlier works were generally large, but this series is small and extremely fragile, so I asked them to make transparent display cases specifically for the indoor setting.”
Shao Chun told us that she graduated in 2019, just as a three-year period of unusual circumstances was beginning. Everyone was living in isolation, so the works became especially small; they had to be handled gently and acquired a faintly private, intimate quality. For her, the works carry many singular memories. Shao Chun, Future Touch, 2020, 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. Her work is also a distinctive presence across the biennial. Many other works are enormous and immediately arresting, while Future Touch requires close, sustained attention.
The skinlike sheen and texture of the sculptures, together with their delicate folds, demand an exceptionally high level of craftsmanship.
“Don’t be fooled by the small size of these soft sculptures: each one takes me more than 2–3 months to make. First, I make the fiber fabric on the surface myself. The skinlike color you see is painted on gradually with cosmetics. Then come the folds and circuitry, and the collage of eyelashes and wigs. It’s extremely complex,” Shao Chun told us. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. Before she was invited, she knew very little about the Sharjah Biennial. Once she learned that it was the oldest biennial in the Middle East, she found herself quite excited.
She was especially moved and inspired by the many works in the exhibition that explored traditional handcraft techniques and minority cultures.
“I especially liked the lace-weaving work. It is a remarkable expression of local craftsmanship, and the presentation is beautiful. They also have a lot of video and interactive art, which makes me want to explore new and unknown aesthetic possibilities.” Liu Chuang, Lithium Lake and Polyphonic Island II, 2023, 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. Portrait of the artist Liu Chuang. The other participating artist, Liu Chuang, was born in Hubei in 1978. After graduating from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in 2001, he settled in Beijing, where he has worked and lived ever since.
His work is a three-channel video based on the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. He borrows the extraterrestrial robot Sophon from the story and reconstructs its identity. It comes to Earth, becomes an anthropologist, and investigates human society, trying from an alien perspective to understand humanity’s past and future, as well as its technological and social conditions. The new story is set against the history, culture, and religion of East Asia. Crossing continents and eras, it explores the interwoven histories of polyphonic music, metal extraction, and technological development.
Liu Chuang, Lithium Lake and Polyphonic Island II, 2023. Liu Chuang, Lithium Lake and Polyphonic Island II, 2023, 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. “For me, this film is a major project. Its themes are highly varied, including the effects of the relationships among social structures such as cross-border exchange and local trade.
“It also contains a great deal about East Asian Buddhist culture. That may be somewhat challenging for local audiences to understand, but I use images from art history and methods resembling aesthetic criticism to help viewers from different cultures follow it. Seeing what is happening elsewhere in the world is itself a form of exchange,” Liu Chuang told us. He guessed that this might be why the curators selected an existing work: “Its retelling of the history of polyphonic music also intersects with the exhibition’s inclusive and heterogeneous themes.”
The work attracted considerable attention on site. Some viewers were fascinated by the “dark forest” theory in The Three-Body Problem; others were curious about “polyphony” as a form of video and musical expression. Mira Turajlić, Non-Aligned Movement Cinematic Research—Sounds in the Ruins, 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist. “Before coming to Sharjah, I already knew something about the biennial. I had previously participated in the Diriyah Biennale and knew something about the Saudi Biennale, but the Sharjah Biennial is the most important in the region. It predates our Shanghai Biennale by one edition.
“Its character is grounded in its relationship to the history of the Middle East. It emphasizes its non-Western identity and its connections with South Asia and Africa, so its context differs from that of East Asian biennials such as Gwangju and Shanghai. In fact, we often see works by Middle Eastern artists at the Shanghai Biennale, but Chinese audiences have less cultural resonance with them and find them difficult to understand.” After several days of viewing, his favorite work was Mira Turajlić’s Non-Aligned Movement Cinematic Research—Sounds in the Ruins.
The work takes the form of a two-channel video presenting a film-aid program from the Tito era alongside an archive-based oral history of ordinary people.
“Revisiting the remnants of past socialist utopias is a subject that interests me,” Liu Chuang explained. He also observed that Middle Eastern artists are, in fact, a vast diaspora, moving continually among Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.
“In this era, people’s working methods are not so different. It takes a long period of practice to find a distinctive way of handling the material you have found.” During the opening of the biennial, we accompanied Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, whose Sharjah Foundation and Sharjah Calligraphy Museum are located at the same site. Our interview took place in the office of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which she founded. She had already spent several days moving nonstop through a dense schedule of opening events, yet her energy remained undiminished.
As soon as she entered, she greeted us in Chinese: “Hello, it’s so nice to meet you!” Many Chinese viewers may have first encountered her two months earlier, when Art Power 100 named her its 2024 leader, prompting them to realize that such a “major figure” existed in the art world. But as one of the most important curators in the Middle East, her influence had long extended beyond this cultural region. Portrait of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, photograph by Sebastian Böttcher. She is the curator of this year’s Aichi Triennale in Japan—the first non-Japanese person in its history to hold the position—and speaks fluent Japanese.
She has also been selected as the curator of the 2026 Sydney Biennale. The Sharjah Foundation, which Hoor founded in 2009, has supported many artists who were once little known and are now celebrated. They include Ibrahim El-Salahi, whose work has been exhibited at Tate Modern; Walid Raad, whose work has been shown at the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre in Paris and who represented Egypt at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013; and Mariam Ghani, currently one of the most sought-after Afghan artists internationally.
Kalba Ice Factory is one of the Sharjah Biennial’s venues, a former ice factory converted for exhibition use. The Flying Saucer was first built in 1970 and has since been transformed by the Sharjah Art Foundation into an art center; it is also a venue for this edition of the biennial. A sculpture outside Sharjah’s House of Wisdom public library. “I began visiting the Sharjah Biennial and meeting artists in 1993, when I was 13.
“I have always been excited by the biennial because it falls around my birthday, like a huge party. That was when I first began to imagine becoming an artist or an art critic,” Hoor told us. She believes that the art world is constantly changing, not only in the Middle East, and that it is therefore difficult to define artistic practice through the characteristics of a single region. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Al Murcijah Art Square, 2025. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Old Al Dhaid Clinic, 2025. “When I studied art in London, some teachers would always tell me, ‘Your work isn’t Islamic enough.’”
“At the same time, perhaps during his formative years, some teachers told him, ‘Your work isn’t Chinese enough.’ No one wants these stereotypes. I want artists to be seen as artists in their own right, regardless of where they come from.” And the Middle East is far more than an Arab cultural world: nearly half its population comes from South Asia.
“Even many of our words for food come from India. Many of our artists belong to diasporic communities, and the questions they address—spiritual exploration, observations of land, or global climate—have long crossed national borders. What matters, therefore, is breaking down these boundaries and misunderstandings,” Hoor said. 16th Sharjah Biennial, Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, 2025. A distinctly local desert dinner. When we laughingly asked whether, for the sake of “correctness,” she had ever considered inviting a male curator,
Hoor laughed. “I look at the career development and work of outstanding curators. I know they are deeply committed and work very hard. It just happens that they are all women. And in the art industry, it is common for women to be in the majority; the Middle East is no exception.” Although Hoor is an important member of Sharjah’s royal family, she has always believed that art should never be placed on a pedestal.
“Art is open to everyone. It does not require you to have received a particular education in order to understand it; it creates a space for people of all ages. I hope people can find their own insights through the experience of viewing art. What moves you depends entirely on your own experiences.”