Sharjah Biennial curator Christine Tohmé says the new edition emphasizes plurality and is a forum to exchange ideas.
What’s behind the subtitle of Tamawuj, for Sharjah Biennial 13?
Tamawuj is an Arabic word that means a rising and falling in waves, a flowing, swelling, surging or fluctuation. This title was chosen to reflect a proposition for a biennial, one that is not a singular event but that enables many temporal spaces to be shared with friends, colleagues and people that we are yet to meet.
The flow motion that Tamawuj suggests is more like a pendulum exchange. It is also an apt metaphor for how most of us in the art world have been working for the past decades.
You have mentioned that Sharjah is like a trampoline from where the other parts of the biennial bounce off from – is that how visitors should view the event?
I also like to think that rather than bouncing off a platform, there is a reciprocal act of exchange between the exhibition and programme in Sharjah and the off-site projects, the SB13 school in Sharjah, the online research platform and our online publishing platform (www.tamawuj.org), where we commission and publish texts and other material around the themes of the biennial.
That is really a massive project with so many facets to explore and engage with. What if an audience member only sees the Sharjah exhibition – will that take away from their appreciation of the entire event?
Not at all. The idea of introducing multiple off-site projects to this edition of the Sharjah Biennial was never an attempt to make a cohesive whole or a narrative that had to be experienced in its entirety.
Every articulation in SB13 feeds off the same conduits of ideas that irrigate the whole system, but could still be experienced on their own terms. Think of them as standalone iterations, rather than episodes of a series that need to be watched in a sequence.
You have selected four artists for the four activations taking place outside of Sharjah in Dakar, Istanbul, Ramallah and Beirut – will those artists also be producing specific artworks?
This invitation is an attempt to introduce plurality as the model for SB13. Rather than producing artworks, the interlocutors conceive of programmes, which bring researchers, artists, and thinkers together.
The first off-site project took place this January in Dakar, with Kader Attia looking at the theme of water, and will be followed by Zeynep Oz looking at the theme of crops in Istanbul (in May); Lara Khaldi looking at the theme of earth in Ramallah (August) and Ashkal Alwan closing in Beirut, with the theme of the culinary (October).
These themes are of course porous as they feed into one another, and together they form what Sharjah Biennial 13 is all about.
• The main event of the Sharjah Biennial runs from March 10-June 12. www.sharjahart.org
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