SHARJAH, (Pakistan Point News - 23rd Dec, 2019) The Sharjah Art Foundation, SAF, today announced its spring 2020 programme, which features major exhibitions exploring vital issues in contemporary art theory and history and examining the work and impact of significant artists.
The programme will also include the foundation’s annual March Meeting, gathering leading artists, curators, and art practitioners from across the region and around the world for a series of talks, workshops and performances.
Art in the Age of Anxiety The most ambitious show-of-its-kind to take place in the middle East, Art in the Age of Anxiety considers how our everyday devices and technologies, as well as their attendant content, networks and systems, have altered our collective consciousness. Presenting a global group of artists whose work stretches from algorithmic culture to virtual reality, including works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Cory Arcangel, Wafaa Bilal, Douglas Coupland, Cao Fei, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jon Rafman and Guan Xiao, as well as a major new commission by Simon Denny, the exhibition tells the story of the culture that we live in now and posits speculations for the future.
Zarina Bhimji Although many of the artist’s works draw from specific historical circumstances, the rise of the anti-immigration sentiment in Britain in the 1970s, the expulsion of South Asians from post-liberation Uganda, the deployment of racial classification in the maintenance of British colonial rule and the Indian Ocean trade routes that have long connected cultures and continents, Bhimji has stated that her intention is not to communicate the facts of such histories but rather to "feel the force with which it all happened".
March Meeting 2020 The 2020 edition of March Meeting, MM 2020, will be organised around the title and theme of the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial 15, SB15, "Thinking Historically in the Present", conceived by the late critic and curator, Okwui Enwezor.
According to Enwezor, the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial will be "structured with a historical prelude in 2020 and contemporary presentations in 2021". Following his vision for the Biennial and coinciding with its 30th anniversary, SB15 will reflect on the Biennial as a means for addressing the disruptive power of "artistic monolingualism" and exploring other approaches to thinking about the past in the present. As its prelude, MM 2020 will serve as a congress for thinking about what Enwezor called the "unravelling present" with artists and members of the global intelligentsia.
