Sharjah Biennial 14: Journey Beyond the Arrow

“Journey Beyond the Arrow” offers deeper context to the movement of humanity and the tools that have enabled or hindered its survival. From spiritual ritual to cultural custom, technological process to rule of law, all such practices employ objects and actions that continually move in voluntary and involuntary patterns of discovery, conquest, witness and exile across land and sea. However, the human journey surround- ing the movement of these tools—its cause and effects, its feedback, its ‘echo’—clam- ors for collective sense amidst textbooks of little historical truth, online archives that are questionably fabricated and governmentally surveilled, and bureaucracies of academic systems of research and rigor that struggle to keep up with the pace of change in their assumed ‘D’isciplines.

In this exhibition, artists reveal the intergenerational impact of a range of physical and psychological ‘tools’, of how the representations and meanings of these tools have shifted as a consequence of colonial exploitation, social and religious conflict or ideological extremism. With their own distinctive approaches, the artists assembled here investigate the historical context of the “bow”, which reveals the “arrow” of humanity’s echo—an echo of the diversity of all our activity in relation to language, memory, belief, ritual, and cultural and social practice. The artists’ imaginative retelling of our planet opens us up to what has been overlooked or lost in the echo chamber—a chamber that is economically intertwined yet governmentally divided, often culturally stymied by tradition and insidiously controlled by authoritarianism, a chamber that betrays us when we blindly participate in its algorithmic realm, which pursues quantity instead of meaning. “Journey Beyond the Arrow” seeks to illuminate the necessity of exchange and diversity across the globe and throughout human history.

Participating artists: 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit, Khadim Ali, Antariksa, Shiraz Bayjoo, Adriana Bustos, Kawayan de Guia, Rohini Devasher, Léuli Eshrāghi, Gudskul, Anawana Haloba, Ho Tzu Nyen, Roslish- am Ismail (Ise), Meiro Koizumi, Jompet Kuswidananto, Lee Mingwei, Nalini Malani, Neo Muyanga, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Ahmad Fuad Osman, Phan Thảo Nguyên, Qiu Zhijie, Lisa Reiha- na, Mark Salvatus, Ampannee Satoh, T. Shanaathanan, Kidlat Tahimik, Lantian Xie, Xu Zhen

Sharjah Biennial 14
7 March – 10 June 2019
Free and open to the public
t +971 6 544 4113
info@sharjahart.org