Sharjah Biennial 8 — Eva Scharrer

The 8th edi­tion of the Shar­jah Bien­nial will open this April in the United Arab Emi­rates under the title “Still Life. Art, Ecol­ogy and the pol­i­tics of change.” But what does it mean to orga­nize a bien­nial about art and ecol­ogy in a time when global cli­mate change is no longer a future prophecy, but is already tak­ing its toll, and when the term “envi­ron­ment” means every­thing and noth­ing? At a place whose ecol­ogy is mainly based on fos­sil fuels, and where, in nearby Dubai, mega-constructions are under­way that will inter­fere in an exist­ing ecosys­tem with yet unpre­dictable con­se­quences? Not to speak of the increas­ing amount of art world air travel, espe­cially in a year where cul­tural mega events like the Venice Bien­nial, Documenta12, Sculp­ture Projects Mün­ster, the Istan­bul Bien­nial and count­less other bien­ni­als and art fairs accu­mu­late into a global art marathon. The dilemma on hand is embed­ded within the sub­ject, and the ques­tion is how to deal with it.

“Can Art Save the Planet?” was the head­line on the front page of this year’s August issue of Art Review, also referred to as “the green issue.” Inter­est­ingly enough, var­i­ous high-gloss, fash­ion mag­a­zines like Vogue, Elle and Van­ity Fair have also launched their “green issues” this year. So, if politi­cians, envi­ron­men­tal­ists and artists fail to save the planet, per­haps fash­ion will.

The pos­si­bil­ity of the above is prob­a­bly nil, and we don’t want to pre­tend that it might not be. But, even if art does not nec­es­sar­ily change the way in which peo­ple behave, it might have the poten­tial to infil­trate and irri­tate people’s way of thinking—at least that’s what we hope. We believe in the role of art as a fram­ing device and cat­a­lyst for visual and social expe­ri­ence and also in the abil­ity of artists to tackle things dif­fer­ently, tak­ing direct action by cir­cum­vent­ing and slip­ping through insti­tu­tional walls, employ­ing sci­ence with­out the bur­den of sci­en­tific strin­gency or slow­ing down the pace by intro­duc­ing a sense of poetry, or poetic dis­obe­di­ence, to the ways of global eco­nom­ics. Con­tem­po­rary art prac­tice has become a con­tin­u­ally expand­ing, mul­ti­ple sciences-embracing field of activ­ity, which is, in itself, as diverse and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary as the cul­tural under­stand­ing of the terms “ecol­ogy” or “envi­ron­men­tal­ism” have become dur­ing the past decades. If art and ecol­ogy join forces, they might have the power to push the dia­logue about our future on this planet to another, per­haps more com­pre­hen­si­ble, level.

But, will the Shar­jah Bien­nial 8 thus become “the green bien­nial”? Doubt­fully. In fact, it might at times even appear to be the oppo­site. And if art is said to be a poten­tial mir­ror of soci­ety, then this bien­nial might not even be (self-)destructive and con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing enough to ful­fill this function.

This thought is of course as hypo­thet­i­cal as it might be provoca­tive. Arguably, as orga­niz­ers and cura­tors, we do have a cer­tain respon­si­bil­ity when address­ing such a threat­en­ing and seri­ous, hyper-actual sub­ject. Ques­tions such as sus­tain­abil­ity should be pri­mary thoughts in every step of pro­duc­tion and realization—not only for SB8, but per­haps for all muse­ums, art fairs and bien­ni­als from now on. But, as we all know, this pro­vides a huge chal­lenge when oper­at­ing within pre­fab­ri­cated con­di­tions and, as always, within a tight time-span. Accord­ingly, the selected artists and projects may raise ques­tions rather than pro­vide solu­tions. Or, they might present solu­tions for ques­tions that have not even been asked yet.

In that pecu­liar time and place, the Shar­jah Bien­nial 8 aims to intro­duce a slightly dif­fer­ent kind of aes­thetic, includ­ing “Do it your­self” approaches and recy­cling meth­ods which ques­tion the love of lux­ury and the ever faster, “higher” lifestyle (specif­i­cally in the regional con­text of the Shar­jah Bien­nial), as well as our daily ways of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion. Via strate­gies of decon­struc­tion and con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, apply­ing research, activist and doc­u­men­tary meth­ods, but also through the use of metaphor, humor and play, the selected artists make vis­i­ble some of the daily absur­di­ties, within which soci­ety today exists.

SB8 fea­tures more than 80 artists from over 40 coun­tries, with a spe­cial focus on con­tem­po­rary art from the Arab world. The major­ity of the invited inter­na­tional artists (includ­ing a.o. Allora & Calzadilla, Lara Almarcegui, Cheri Cherin, Gra­ham Gussin, Tue Green­fort, Marya Kazoun, Joachim Koester, Pablo Patrucco, Dan Per­jovschi, Mar­jet­ica Potrc, Michael Rakowitz, Tomas Sara­ceno and Rikrit Tira­vanija) will develop new work or site-specific, in-situ instal­la­tions. Oth­ers will present exist­ing works that have been cho­sen for their rel­e­vance with regard to the topic and the con­text of the Shar­jah Bien­nial (Roy Arden, Ignasi Aballi, Deb­o­rah Lig­o­rio, Mona Hatoum, Cor­nelia Parker, Zineb Sedira and Simon Star­ling, among oth­ers). Sev­eral artists, such as Ran­jani Shet­tar, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Len­zlinger and Luca Vitone have devel­oped works for the Shar­jah Her­itage Area, and there will be ambi­tious, large-scale out­door instal­la­tions by artists such as Tomas Sara­ceno and Gus­tav Metzger.

The projects com­mis­sioned for the Shar­jah Bien­nial 8 might range from the allegedly utopian to the fun­da­men­tally dis­turb­ing, from the invis­i­ble to the spec­tac­u­lar. There will be moments where peo­ple, locked up in an inflat­able, solar-powered bal­loon, have to decide in which direc­tion to go with­out see­ing out, where air con­di­tion­ers are made into a cumu­lus cloud to cre­ate arti­fi­cial rain or where cars fill a cubic struc­ture with their exhaust fumes to cre­ate a mon­u­ment to human destruc­tion. One artist declares the gulf basin as his Duchampian ready-made and research site, and another under­takes a jour­ney through­out which he feeds the boat he’s trav­el­ing in to its own engine until the boat and its pas­sen­ger sink. These works may indeed not save the planet, but they serve as man­i­fold metaphors for human exis­tence on earth, and hope­fully they will raise a broader con­scious­ness of how we relate to our envi­ron­ment and its resources.

Some artis­tic attempts might look untimely or even naïve in response to today’s achieve­ments of fast and com­fort­able com­mut­ing. For exam­ple, an artist propos­ing to not fly any­more in the 21st cen­tury and choos­ing to travel to the United Arab Emi­rates with­out board­ing a sin­gle air­plane. But isn’t it in fact more naïve to think that man can recon­struct the earth accord­ing to his own will and can con­tinue to let loose into the atmos­phere emis­sion fuel exhausts with­out hav­ing to live out the consequences?

Last but not least, the bien­nial will also include work that looks at nature with a sen­ti­men­tal or dis­en­chanted glance, see­ing it as a frag­ile con­struc­tion and shed­ding light on the sheer beauty of endan­gered species.

The dif­fer­ent approaches that the Shar­jah Bien­nial 8 will present might raise para­doxes, argue with each other or ques­tion each other. They might also mush­room to our own sur­prise, or per­haps fail in their attempts. Hav­ing pro­posed the theme of the bien­nial with a cer­tain open­ness, rather than con­struct­ing a finite con­cep­tual frame­work or pre­scrib­ing an ulti­mate approach in rela­tion to the sub­ject at hand, cer­tainly bears risks for cura­tors and orga­niz­ers. Per­haps we can see this bien­nial as a metaphor­i­cal ecosys­tem, just as the field of con­tem­po­rary art has become a com­plex global ecosys­tem in itself—where the var­i­ous com­po­nents inter­fere and inter­act. An ecosys­tem, which, hope­fully in the end, sur­vives and suc­ceeds as a whole.