Curatorial Team Announced for 17th Sharjah Biennial

Curatorial Team Announced for 17th Sharjah Biennial

The Sharjah Art Foundation, which organizes theSharjah Biennial, has named Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento as the curators of the Biennial’s seventeenth iteration, which is set to open in January 2027. “Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices,” said Hoor Al Qasimi, the foundation’s president and director, in a statement. “Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.”

Born in 1982 in Gyumri, Armenia, Harutyunyan is professor of contemporary art and theory at the Berlin University of the Arts with a background in post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality, and curatorial theory. She taught at the American University of Beirut from 2011 to 2023 and at the American University in Cairo before that. She is a founding member of both the Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Yeravan, and the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research, as well as a founding editor of the journalARTMargins, which is published by MIT Press. She holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from the University of Manchester.

“I am interested to explore the possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity,” said Harutyunyan in a statement. “I would like to explore the way in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.”

Nascimento, an architect and curator specializing in contemporary readings of historical themes relating to Africa and the Global South, was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1981. She is currently curatorial advisor to Hangar—Centre for Artistic Research in Lisbon and a member of the acquisitions committee of CAM—Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian. Previous roles include that of associate curator of the 2022 and 2019 editions of the Lubumbashi Biennale. As well, she contributed to the 2017 Rencontres de Bamako—African Biennale of Photography, the 2016 Triennale di Milano, and the 2015 iteration of Experimenta Design. In 2013, Nascimento cocurated the Golden Lion–winning Angola Pavilion at the Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale.

“Biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with forms and models of exhibition-making and spaces for gathering communities and social and physical transformation,” said Nascimento in a statement, further noting that she is “interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between art making and infrastructure in an expanded way” and in “exploring art’s capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations.”