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6 April - 6 June 2005
Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
President & Chief Director: Hoor Al Qasimi
Curator: Jack Persekian
Co-curators: Ken Lum and Tirdad Zolghadr
Visual tour - 42 participants
more than 140 photos with information
About 'Belonging', the theme of SB7
By Hoor Al Qasimi, President & Chief Director, Sharjah Biennial 7
(Extract from the Preface in the catalogue)
The 7th Sharjah Biennial addresses issues of belonging, identity, and cultural location. These are not new issues, but our current culture of mobility, mass migration, and so-called globalisation—which threatens the erosion of culturally distinctive places and the international cultural flows of the postcolonial world—make these issues more pressing than ever. We are now territorialized in a way that has serious consequences for our collective and individual identities. As individuals, many of us are increasingly affected by issues of belonging that are related to geography, culture, and borders, the implication being that the link between identity and place has become problematic.
Art inhabits the border and provides a means for exploring and questioning issues at the core of our existence. The main part of the 7th Sharjah Biennial looks at preconceived ideas about identity and place that are assumed in imperial, patriarchal, nationalist, or fundamentalist discourses: What does it mean to belong to a culture? What does it mean to speak of 'a culture’, 'a people', 'a tribe', 'a nation'? How are the local, the regional, and the global interconnected? Can new spatial metaphors convey the new sense of dislocation and displacement that we are experiencing? How do the mass media contribute to an awareness of our fundamental similarities and differences? What does it mean to belong to a place when the majority of us have access to worldwide news and entertainment? Artists may be more concerned with asking pertinent questions than with offering definitive answers.
© Text: Hoor Al Qasimi, President & Chief Director, Sharjah Biennial 7. Extract from the Preface in the catalogue of SB7
Cover image on top: Nuha Asad, Faces with One Feature. Performance on the Arts Square, during the opening of the Sharjah Biennial 7, 6 April 2005.
© Photos: Universes in Universe, unless otherwise indicated